Helping others sleep better every night!
From the category archives:
Less than half of Americans say they get a good night’s sleep every night. Combine excessive sleepiness with an automobile, a long drive, and the one of the heaviest travel weekends of the year, and our risk for a fall-asleep crash increases significantly.
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This New Year’s Eve Cumberland Farms is making life a little bit easier for revelers, as we bid so-long to 2009 and ring in 2010.
From 5 p.m. on December 31, 2009 until 5 a.m. on January 1, 2010, all Cumberland Farms locations will be offering free, piping-hot Farmhouse Blend coffee for the third year in a row.
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Most all drivers have experienced it after long hours driving: the eyelids get heavy, a deep yawn, the neck muscles relax, the urge to sleep moves in, and then the head nodding up-and-down begins.
The problem with this is that the driver’s hands are still on the steering wheel, and many fortunate drivers were able to stop nodding in time to avoid an accident, such as with on-coming traffic or an overpass. For 100,000 drivers each year, though, a crash results, often proving to be fatal.
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On Feb. 13, 2008, passengers aboard a Go! flight in Hawaii never realized how lucky they were when the plane landed in one piece. Both the pilot and co-pilot fell asleep while the plane was aloft and actually flew 26 miles past its landing site, the airport at Hilo.
“The captain and first officer inadvertently [fell] asleep during the cruise phase of flight,” noted the National Transportation Safety Board in its final report. Fortunately for all aboard, the jet carried extra fuel for a return trip to Honolulu. That extra fuel came in handy when the pilots awake and learned they had flown past the runway — and airport.
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Driver sleepiness is already known to contribute to about one in three car accidents, and obstructive sleep apnea patients are known to be at greater risk. The extent to which obstructive sleep apnea exacerbates the effects of normal sleepiness or alcohol consumption on driving ability was not previously known.
Andrew Vakulin, a Ph.D. candidate at Australia’s Adelaide Institute for Sleep Health, and colleagues investigated the effects of sleep restriction and moderate alcohol exposure on patients with OSA with respect to their performance on a simulated driving task.
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Commercial truck accidentrs are a significant public health hazard causing thousands of deaths and injuries each year, with driver fatigue and sleepiness being major causes.
A new study has confirmed previous findings that obesity-driven testing strategies identify commercial truck drivers with a high likelihood of obstructive sleep apnea and suggests that mandating obstructive sleep apnea screenings could reduce the risk of truck crashes.
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