Driving with lack of sleep is as dangerous as drunk driving

By Aaron Levin, Staff Writer
Health Behavior News Service
BETHESDA, Md.

Lack of sleep may seem like a minor problem to millions of people but it is also a major auto safety issue, a leading sleep researcher said Monday.

Drowsy driving represents perhaps the single greatest risk to people who have had inadequate sleep due to medical disorders, work schedules or life styles, said David F. Dinges, Ph.D., of the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine at a conference on sleep at the National Institutes of Health.

He said fatality rates and severity of injury among sleepy motorists is similar to those in alcohol-related crashes.

A driver awake for 22 straight hours, he said, has ?psychomotor performance equivalent to a 0.08 blood alcohol concentration.

Once sleep drops below seven hours a night, perception and reaction time start to suffer, he said.

Tests that require a person to push a button in response to a light flashing show that greater sleepiness results in not only more missed signals but also more unwarranted button-pushing in an attempt to compensate.

Even though these lapses may last just seconds, that may be enough to precipitate a disaster, he said.

A drowsy driver doing 60 miles per hour can drift off the road at a 4-degree angle and get beyond the shoulder in just four seconds, Dinges said.
Response time isn t the only killer, either. The more tired people are, the more sharply they drop off into sleep, even when they re trying hard to stay awake, he said.

Yet people tend to blame the problem not on physical exhaustion but on the situation a long drive, a repetitive job, a boring lecture instead of the physiology of sleep.

The real consequences of sleepiness may not even be known with any accaccuracy, he said. People can recall the time they spend in bed, but this is not the same as actual time asleep.

To combat the risks posed by sleepiness, Dinges offered three prescriptions: training doctors to recognize sleepiness as a symptom; setting up a standardized system to rate the sedating effects of prescription drugs; and updating sleep-related regulation of working hours and conditions based on scientifically proven information.

If you sleep and drive your a bloody idiot
Health Behavior News Service