And cause more car accidents

Feb 15, 2010 09:53 GMT  ·  By

A new investigation has determined that adolescents who sleep less than their peers, or who have a poorer quality of sleep, tend to be involved in significantly more car crashes. Sleepiness behind the wheel is caused directly by these two factors, and it is often considered to be one of the main catalysts of events that lead to severe crashes. The risks that sleep, or the lack thereof, pose to adolescent drivers are detailed in a paper published yesterday, in the February 15 issue of the scientific Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine.

“Commonly used countermeasures to fatigue, such as opening the window, listening to the radio, or drinking a coffee, are known to be short-lasting and, essentially, useless. Moreover, if a subject perceives sleepiness, he or she would probably already have a reduced performance at the wheel, and nobody can safely detect the real instant when sleep is starting in order to stop driving at that time,” University of Bologna Professor of Neurology Fabio Cirignotta says. The Italian researcher is also the lead author of the new study. He argues that the best thing to do when feeling sleepiness creeping in is stopping on the side of the road, and napping for 15 to 20 minutes before resuming driving.

The research was conducted on 339 students from high schools in Bologna, who were given questionnaires. These documents were meant to provide researchers with the necessary backgrounds to base their statistical correlations upon. The questions in the papers looked at the lifestyle habits participants had, at their sleeping habits, as well as at their coping measures of dealing with sleepiness while behind the wheel. One of the things that really jumped out when the scientists peered over the data was the fact that 45 percent of students reported waking up in the middle of the night, 40 said they had a rough time waking up, and 19 reported poor sleep. These are all indicators of a low sleep hygiene.

The study concluded that most of these children suffered from chronic sleep deprivation. The students themselves reported needing at least 9.2 hours of rest each night, but wrote that they only got an average of 7.3 hours of sleep during weeknights. The amount was slightly higher for Friday and Saturday nights, which were part of the weekend. The study also found that an average of six percent of the test subjects slept more than nine hours during weeknights. Roughly 60 percent of all students reported trying to catch up on their sleep times by going to bed for nine hours or more during the weekend.