The Highway Patrol may soon be testing for driving impairment via sleep deprivation as well as alcohol and drugs after Monash University this week developed a blood test that can accurately detect whether someone has slept within the last 24 hours.
Going a single night without sleep drastically reduces the body’s ability to react and respond to situations – sleep deprivation causes about 20% of Australia’s road accidents.
The results of Monash’s tests have been published in the Science Advances journal, describing a combination of several blood markers that can accurately predict if study volunteers had been awake for more than 24 hours under laboratory conditions.
The test had a 99.2% probability of being correct when compared to a well-rested sample from the same individual and an 89.1% chance of an accurate prediction based on a single sleep-deprived sample.
Reducing accidents caused by sleep deprivation
Senior author Professor Clare Anderson led the research while she was with the Monash University School of Psychological Sciences and Turner Institute for Brain and Mental Health. She is now Professor of Sleep and Circadian Science at the University of Birmingham in the UK.
“This is a really exciting discovery for sleep scientists and could be transformative to the future management of health and safety relating to insufficient sleep,” Prof Anderson said.
“While more work is required, this is a promising first step.
“There is strong evidence that less than five hours’ sleep is associated with unsafe driving but driving after 24 hours awake, which is what we detected here, would be at least comparable to more than double the Australian legal limit of alcohol performance-wise.”
The test is not yet ready for forensic use, like in traffic stops, but could be ideal for the purpose once further validated by more research.
First author Dr Katy Jeppe, from the Monash Proteomics and Metabolomics Platform, previously from the School of Psychological Sciences, said it was difficult to say how soon the test could be developed for post-accident use.
“Next steps would be to test it in a less controlled environment and maybe under forensic conditions, particularly if it was to be used as evidence for crashes involving drivers falling asleep,” Dr Jeppe said.
“Given it’s blood, the test is more limited in a roadside context, but future work could examine whether our metabolites, and therefore the biomarker, are evident in saliva or breath.”
While testing for impaired driving could be one of the more far-reaching uses for the test, researchers point out that sleep deprivation can also have fatal consequences in high-risk and safety-critical operations.
Major catastrophes including the Chernobyl nuclear reactor meltdown and the Challenger space shuttle Disaster are thought to be caused, in part, by human error associated with fatigue.
“Objective tests that identify individuals who present as a risk to themselves or others are urgently needed in situations where the cost of a mistake is fatal,” Prof Anderson said.
“Alcohol testing was a game changer for reducing road crashes and associated serious injuries and fatalities, and it is possible that we can achieve the same with fatigue. But much work is still required to meet this goal.”