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TRUCKERS' HEALTH * WORLDWIDE
* Austria - Study: Truckers might understate sleep apnea symptoms for fear of losing job
Vienna,Austria -Fleet Owner (USA), by Deborah Whistler -Sep. 11, 2012: -- Commercial truck drivers could be incorrectly reporting symptoms of sleep apnea due to their fears of endangering their employment, according to a new study released at the European Respiratory Society’s (ERS) Annual Congress in Vienna... Dr. Werner Strobel, University Hospital, Switzerland, and lead author of the study, said that although this is very difficult to prove, that data recovered from a study of commercial drivers versus a control group of patients indicates commercial drivers downplayed their sleepiness compared to other patients... Researchers examined 37 commercial vehicle drivers with sleep apnea and compared them with a control group of 74 patients. Both groups had similar characteristics of age, body mass index (BMI) and similar numbers of disturbances suffered on average during the night... The results also showed that drivers received less treatment (only receiving CPAP for an average of 75% of days, compared with 83%) and also had more unscheduled visits to the clinic, which suggests they were struggling with their symptoms. As commercial drivers regularly do shift work, they don’t follow regular patterns of sleep and also do not always sleep in one place; this makes adherence to CPAP treatment more difficult, researchers said... The authors speculate that the lower scores reported by the commercial drivers could be due to drivers under-scoring their sleepiness levels for fear of losing their license...
Labels: truckers health
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