One Real Cost We All Pay For Sleep-Deprivation

From Ash:

There's one aspect of sleep deprivation for adults that I think is so important, that I really think that if this blog post could be forwarded around enough, it could help save lives.

A study for the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration reported that, between 1999 and 2003, drivers falling asleep at the wheel were responsible for an estimated 1.35 million car accidents.

Sleepy drivers are just as impaired in reaction times and judgment as drunk drivers – to the point that the experts can actually give you equivalent blood alcohol measurements depending on how much sleep deprivation you've had.

But that's just a "drowsy driver."

A driver who actually falls asleep is even more dangerous than the drunk driver. Because if she's asleep, she's never going to hit the brakes, turn the wheel, or take any evasive action. The car just keeps going forward until it runs into something. So a fall-asleep crash is almost always serious and rarely just a fender-bender. Statistically, "fall-asleep accidents" are actually much more deadly than other types of crashes.

As we wrote in an earlier post, young adults, who are the most sleep-deprived, are disproportionately responsible for sleep-related car accidents: young adults are involved in 55% of the 100,000 fall-asleep crashes annually, even though they aren't even close to being half of the driving population.

Now, if you just did the math and realized that the national studies' numbers aren't consistent, that's because the 100,000 accident rate is based on police reports. But the police determine that sleep was the culprit only when they've ruled out every other reason for the crash to have occurred. So, for example, they rule out weather, alcohol, mechanical failure, etc. until there's no other possible explanation than the driver fell asleep. Thus it's a low estimate.

The 200,000+ accident annual figure comes from a nationally representative survey that asked people about their driving habits and sleep-related crashes. Not surprisingly, drivers were more willing to confess to fall-asleep crashes to the researchers than they were willing to admit to the police.

That's the kind of question that usually has an artificially low response though – because people don't like to admit that they are to blame for an accident. So that too, is a low estimate.

So how big a problem is this, really?

A couple of the sleep experts privately told me that if the real figures were known, we'd discover that more young people die in fall-asleep crashes than drunk-driving accidents.