Sleepy adolescents prone to accidents

LONDON - Sleepiness while driving significantly increases the risk of motor vehicle accidents in adolescents, a new study has confirmed.

The study suggests adolescent drivers were twice as likely to crash if they experienced sleepiness while driving or reported having bad sleep.

Eighty of the 339 students surveyed for the study had already crashed at least once and 15 percent of them considered sleepiness to have been the main cause of the crash.

Fifty-six percent of students who had at least one previous crash reported driving while sleepy, compared with 35 percent of subjects who had not been in a crash.

Fabio Cirignotta, professor of neurology at the University of Bologna in Italy, who led the study, said that the only effective countermeasure to drowsiness is to stop driving immediately, pull over to a safe place and nap for 10 to 15 minutes.

“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,” said Cirignotta.

“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.”

This cross-sectional study was conducted in 2004 and was supported by the Italian ministry of education.

Self-administered questionnaires were distributed to 339 students who had a driver’s licence and were in their last two years of attendance at one of seven high schools in Bologna.

Students were between the ages of 18 and 21 years (mean 18.4 years), and 58 percent of them were male.

Results show that students suffered from chronic sleep deprivation. Although they reported that their sleep need was a mean of 9.2 hours per night, the students reported sleeping for an average of only 7.3 hours on weeknights.

Only six percent of students slept nine hours or more on weeknights, and 58 percent tried to catch up by sleeping nine hours or more on weekends, says a University of Bolgona release.

The combination of chronic sleep loss and poor sleep quality had a negative effect on their alertness, as 64 percent of participants complained of excessive daytime sleepiness.

These findings were published in the Monday issue of The Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine (JCSM).