Alcohol, lack of sleep, hurts driving

Adelaide, Australia -- Low-dose alcohol and moderate sleep deprivation can hurt young men’s subjective alertness and performance while driving, Australian researchers found.

Study author Andrew Vakulin, of the Adelaide Institute for Sleep Health at Repatriation General Hospital in Australia, studied 21 healthy young men, ages 18 to 30, who all had normal sleep patterns and no sleep disorders.

The study participants completed a 70-minute simulated driving session, which included steering deviation, braking reaction time, and number of collisions and underwent repeated measures with four experimental conditions: normal sleep without alcohol, sleep restriction alone of four hours and sleep restriction in combination with Blood Alcohol Content levels of 0.025 g/dL and 0.035 g/dL.

Steering deviation increased significantly when sleep restriction was combined with the higher dose alcohol and also resulted in greater subjective sleepiness and negative driving performance ratings compared to control or sleep restriction alone, reported the journal Sleep.

"The ability to keep the car in the middle of the lane is critical to safe driving, and is one of the more sensitive measures of driving impairment," Vakulin said in a statement. "Although steering deviation was not significantly affected by sleep restriction alone, alcohol at a Blood Alcohol Content as low as 0.025 g/dL in combination with sleep restriction was sufficient to significantly impair steering ability."

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