(Reuters Health) — People with blood alcohol levels below the legal cutoff may still be unsafe drivers if they’re also sleep deprived, a small experiment suggests.
Researchers tested drowsiness and attention in 16 healthy men between 18 and 27 exposed to sleep deprivation or alcohol consumption, or both at once. They found that the combination of moderate alcohol consumption — within legal limits for driving — and restricting sleep to five hours a night produced greater drowsiness and more deficits in attention than either sleep restriction or alcohol intake alone. The combined effects lasted two to three hours.
“No amount of alcohol intake has been deemed safe when under the influence of sleepiness through either poor or inadequate sleep, or being awake when the body (should be) asleep at night,” said study co-author Clare Anderson of the Institute of Cognitive and Clinical Neuroscience at Monash University in Australia.
