Journal of sleep research
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Journal of sleep research · Jun 2018
Effect of the use of earplugs and eye mask on the quality of sleep in intensive care patients: a systematic review.
Intensive care unit (ICU) environment has a very strong and unavoidable negative impact on patients' sleep. Sleep deprivation in ICU patients has been already studied and negative effects on their outcome (prolonged ICU stay, decreased recovery) and complication rates (incidence of delirium, neuropsychological sequels of critical illness) discussed. Several interventions potentially improving the sleep disturbance in ICU (sleep-promotion strategies) have been assumed and tested for clinical practice. ⋯ Most of the reviewed studies showed a significant improvement of subjective sleep quality when using described non-pharmacological interventions (objective parameters were not significantly validated). Measuring the sleep quality is a major concern limiting the objective comparison of the studies' results since non-standardised (and mainly individual) tools for sleep quality assessment were used. Despite the heterogeneity of analysed studies and some common methodological issues (sample size, design, outcome parameters choice and comparison) earplugs and eye mask showed potential positive effects on sleep quality and the incidence of delirium in ICU patients.
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Journal of sleep research · Jun 2018
Highway driving safety the day after using sleep medication: the direction of lapses and excursions out-of-lane in drowsy drivers.
The primary outcome measure of the on-road driving test is the Standard Deviation of Lateral Position. However, other outcome measures, such as lapses and excursions out-of-lane, also need to be considered as they may be related to crash risk. The aim of this study was to determine the direction of lapses and excursions out-of-lane (i.e. towards/into the adjacent traffic lane or towards/into the road shoulder). ⋯ The analyses revealed that lapses were made equally frequently over left (49.4%) and over right (43.3%). In contrast, excursions out-of-lane were almost exclusively directed over right into the (safer) road shoulder (97.3%). These findings suggest that drivers are unaware of having lapses, whereas excursions out-of-lane are events where the driver is aware of loss of vehicle control.