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Get Your Zzzs -- Or Risk a Car Accident
Dec. 21, 1999 (Washington) -- Better rest up before any long holiday drives. Drivers with six hours or less of sleep and those who work night shifts are at a relatively huge risk for crashing, according to research results unveiled yesterday.
Researchers from the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety and the University of North Carolina (UNC) Highway Safety Research Center, in Chapel Hill, interviewed 1,400 drivers. The study compared those drivers who had had accidents for sleep reasons with those who had crashed for unrelated reasons and those who hadn't recently had an accident. More than 24% of drivers who crashed from sleepiness had had less than six hours of sleep, vs. 11% for non-sleep-related crashers and 7% for drivers who hadn't crashed.
According to Bradley Vaughn, MD, one of the UNC researchers, "We as a society don't view sleep as a necessary function but more as a luxury. We try to shorten the amount of sleep we get and are more sleep-deprived as a society."
According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, about 1,500 highway deaths occur each year related to crashes triggered by drowsiness.
Although those deaths are just a fraction of the nation's 40,000-plus road crash fatalities, sleepiness may be underrecognized as a precipitating factor.
David Willis, president of the AAA foundation, said that sleepiness may account for as much as 10-15% of highway deaths. He noted that there is no test for sleepiness and that some state accident reporting forms don't list drowsiness as a factor in accidents.
Anyone can get dangerously sleepy behind the wheel, not just the late- and long-shift workers and young men identified as high-risk in the study. William "Buck" Carter, a Virginia state police trooper, said, "I've stopped doctors, lawyers, and teenagers. Everybody is subject to this." And those drivers may not get off easy. "I have written tickets for it," he said.
Earlier this month, the American Medical Association voted to designate sleepy driving as a major public health issue. Indeed, the problem may be getting worse.
Ricardo Martinez, MD, former administrator of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and WebMD's VP for health affairs, says, "Shift workers are one of the fastest growing segments of society. We're becoming a 24-hour society." According to Carter, seven of every 10 people he pulls over on a night assignment are driving erratically because of sleepiness.
Willis also pointed to truckers as a problem area. Some trucking firms, he said, "exploit their workers" for the sake of speedy delivery. Drivers "don't get enough sleep generally," he said, noting that back-of-the-truck berths offer a poor-quality snooze.
But Mike Russell, spokesman for the American Trucking Associations, tells WebMD that for fatal accidents involving drowsiness, "The car is involved 95.9% of the time. Trucks are [at fault] 3.3% of the time. It suggests that we're the professional drivers on the road."
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