Don't Sleep and Drive!

 Do you ever find yourself pretty drowsy headed home after a long week of classes? I know I do, some people blast the A/C of let down the windows but I like to turn my radio up and sing as loud as I can. It helps me sort of perk up and makes the drive go a lot faster. But unfortunately those little tricks might not work for everyone. According to the National Commission on Sleep Disorders Research drowsiness is likely to be a cause of 36 percent of all fatal car accidents, and unfortunately some people cannot control their drowsiness as easily because some people suffer from sleep apnea.

In Dr. Teran-Santos’s study over sleep apnea and car accidents they put together 2 different groups, one group being the control and they set out to find a correlation between sleep apnea and a possible elevated risk of car accidents. so they gathered 254 subjects and randomly split them into the two groups. The participants filled put questionnaires a general one and one for signs of sleep apnea. Then the participants underwent PSG to determine whether they had sleep apnea or not.

Overall the experimenters did find a rather significant correlation between sleep apnea and car accidents. Those who had sleep apnea were far more likely to have an accident. This probability was also increased if the driver had under the influence of alcohol the day of the accident.

What I thought was interesting was that they found the ESS did not accurately represent their findings, which I guess is odd but to me I think the result they got from the scale wasn’t too surprising in that it is a subjective way of finding out how sleepy someone feels and there have been cases where people are known to over and well as underestimate how they feel.

You always hear about sleep apnea affecting someone’s sleep but this is my first time hearing about it affecting performance in the day time. This is great information for people who do suffer from sleep apnea and it could potentially save someone’s life in the long run