Sleep loss and accidents-Work hours, life style, and sleep pathology

Torbjörn Åkerstedt, Pierre Philip, Aurore Capelli, Göran Kecklund
Progress in Brain Research. 2011-01-01; : 169-188
DOI: 10.1016/B978-0-444-53817-8.00011-6

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1. Prog Brain Res. 2011;190:169-88. doi: 10.1016/B978-0-444-53817-8.00011-6.

Sleep loss and accidents–work hours, life style, and sleep pathology.

Akerstedt T(1), Philip P, Capelli A, Kecklund G.

Author information:
(1)Departement of Clinical Neuroscience, Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm,
Sweden.

A very important outcome of reduced sleep is accidents. The present chapter will
attempt to bring together some of the present knowledge in this area. We will
focus on the driving situation, for which the evidence of the link between sleep
loss and accidents is quite well established, but we will also bring up working
life in general where evidence is more sparse. It should be emphasized that
reduced sleep as a cause of accidents implies that the mediating factor is
sleepiness (or fatigue). This link is discussed elsewhere in this volume, but
here we will bring in sleepiness (subjective or physiological) as an explanatory
factor of accidents. Another central observation is that many real life accident
studies do not link accidents to reduced sleep, but infer reduced sleep and/or
sleepiness from the context, like, for example, from work schedules, life styles,
or sleep pathology. Reduced sleep is mainly due to suboptimal work schedules (or
to a suboptimal life style) or to sleep pathology. We have divided the present
chapter into two areas.

Copyright © 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

DOI: 10.1016/B978-0-444-53817-8.00011-6
PMID: 21531252 [Indexed for MEDLINE]

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