Treatment with nasal CPAP decreases automobile accidents in patients with sleep apnea.

We studied 50 consecutive patients to test the hypothesis that successful treatment of obstructive sleep apnea with nasal continuous positive airway pressure (nasal CPAP) will decrease automobile accidents in patients with sleep apnea. Thirty-six (72%) of the patients reported using nasal CPAP regularly during 2 yr. Fourteen patients reported they had not used CPAP during 2 yr.

Time-on-task decrements in "steer clear" performance of patients with sleep apnea and narcolepsy.

Loss of attention with time-on-task reflects the increasing instability of the waking state during performance in experimentally induced sleepiness. To determine whether patients with disorders of excessive sleepiness also displayed time-on-task decrements indicative of wake state instability, visual sustained attention performance on "Steer Clear," a computerized simple RT driving simulation task, was compared among 31 patients with untreated sleep apnea, 16 patients with narcolepsy, and 14 healthy control subjects. Vigilance decrement functions were generated by analyzing the number of collisions in each of six four-minute periods of Steer Clear task performance in a mixed-model analysis of variance and linear regression equations.

[Driving performance and auto accidents in patients with sleep apnea].

Obstructive sleep apnea is a common disorder in which the airway repetitively collapses during sleep; patients with sleep apnea are often inattentive and sleepy. This review discusses driving performance and automobile accidents in patients with sleep apnea. Finally, we discuss the effect of therapy upon driving performance and reported accidents in these subjects.