Sleep-deprived driving

Sleep-deprived driving is the operation of a motor vehicle while being cognitively impaired by a lack of sleep. Sleep deprivation is a major cause of motor vehicle accidents, and it can impair the human brain as much as alcohol can. According to a 1998 survey, 23% of adults have fallen asleep while driving. According to the United States Department of Transportation, male drivers admit to have fallen asleep while driving twice as much as female drivers.

In the United States, 250,000 drivers fall asleep at the wheel every day, according to the Division of Sleep Medicine at Harvard Medical School and in a national poll by the National Sleep Foundation, 54% of adult drivers said they had driven while drowsy during the past year with 28% saying they had actually fallen asleep while driving. According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, drowsy driving is a factor in more than 100,000 crashes, resulting in 1,550 deaths and 40,000 injuries annually in the USA.

When a person does not get an adequate amount of sleep his or her ability to function is affected. As listed below their coordination is impaired, have longer reaction time, impairs judgment, and memory is impaired. This means a person who is tired has a higher rate of forgetting things and not being able to remember things.

The effects of sleep deprivation on driving performance
Sleep deprivation has been proven to affect driving ability in three areas: Sufficient sleep before driving improves memory. Researchers recorded activity in the hippocampus during learning, and recorded from the same locations during sleep. The results were patterns that occurred during sleep resembled those that occurred during learning, except they were more rapid during sleep. Also, the amount of hippocampal activity during sleep correlated highly with a subsequent improvement in performance.
 * 1) It impairs coordination.
 * 2) It causes longer reaction times.
 * 3) It impairs judgment.
 * 4) It impairs memory and ability to retain information.

Signs that tell a driver of a need to stop and rest
 * 1) Difficulty focusing, frequent blinking, or heavy eyelids
 * 2) Daydreaming; wandering/disconnected thoughts
 * 3) Trouble remembering last few miles driven or missing exits and streets signs
 * 4) Yawning repeatedly/rubbing eyes
 * 5) Trouble keeping head up
 * 6) Drifting from lane to lane, tailgating, or hitting a shoulder or rumble strip
 * 7) Feeling restless and irritable

The effects of sleep deprivation compared to the effects of alcohol
Numerous studies have found that sleep deprivation can affect driving as much as (and sometimes more than) alcohol. British researchers have found that driving after 17 to 18 hours of being awake is as harmful as driving with a blood alcohol level of .05%, the legal limit in many European countries. The MythBusters TV show dedicated a special episode "Tipsy vs. Tired" to exploring these findings and has confirmed that sleep deprivation can be more dangerous than driving under the influence of a minor amount of alcohol.

Accidents
It has been estimated that between 16% and 60% of all accidents have sleep deprivation as a cause. Between 1989 and 1993, it has been estimated that an average of 1,544 people were killed annually in the US as a result of sleep-deprived driving. Accidents related to sleep deprivation are most likely to happen in the early to midafternoon, and in the very early morning hours. Sleep deprivation was blamed a major cause of the Selby rail crash in which 10 people died and 82 were injured.

The reason that accidents are mostly likely to happen during the early to midafternoon may have to do with the biological time clock. Each person's body has its own. Most people run on a daily rhythm of approximately 24 hours, but this can vary from person to person. The reason night time driving is so risky is because sleep becomes an irresistible urge especially from about midnight until 6 a.m. A sleepy period is also "programed" for the afternoon which makes that a risky time. The biological master clock in the hypothalamus is the suprachiasmatic nucleus or SCN. It provides the main control of the circadian rhythms for sleep, body temperature and other functions.

Sleep-deprived driving in commercial transportation and in the military
Sleep-deprived driving is a major problem in commercial transportation and in the military. 20% of commercial pilots and 18% of train operators have admitted to making a serious error due to fatigue. Commercial truck drivers are especially susceptible to drowsy driving. A recent study of 80 long-haul truck drivers in the United States and Canada found that drivers averaged less than 5 hours of sleep per day. The National Transportation Safety Board reported that drowsy driving was likely the cause of more than half of crashes leading to a truck driver’s death. For each truck driver fatality, another three to four people are killed. The US military estimates that approximately 9% of crashes resulting in death or serious injury during Operation Desert Storm and Operation Desert Shield were caused by sleep-deprived driving.

Physician reporting
Six US states require physicians to report patients who drive while impaired, including those who may be chronically sleep-deprived. Another twenty-five US states permit physicians to violate doctor-patient confidentiality to report sleep-deprived drivers or those with sleeping disorders likely to impair driving, if they so choose. The American Medical Association endorsed physician reporting in 1999, but deferred to the states on whether such notification should be mandatory or permissive. An authority on professional confidentiality, Jacob Appel of New York University, has written that physician reporting is a double-edged sword, because it may deter some patients from seeking care. According to Appel, "Reporting may remove some dangerous drivers from the roads, but if in doing so it actually creates other dangerous drivers, by scaring them away from treatment, then society has sacrificed confidentiality for no tangible return in lives saved."

Government response to sleep-deprived driving
Governments had attempted to reduce sleep-deprived driving through education messages and by ingraining roads with dents, known as rumble strips in the US, which cause a noise when drivers wander out of their lane. The Government of Western Australia recently introduced a "Driver Reviver" program where drivers can receive free coffee to help them stay awake.

In the United Kingdom, a motor vehicle driver can be convicted of causing death by dangerous driving if the prosecution can prove that the driver of that vehicle knew that he or she had been sleep deprived, and killed another person as a result of driving while sleep deprived.