GENERAL INFLUENCES CHART

Sleep Deprivation
General Influences
Media:
The annual Sleep in America poll by the National Sleep Foundation, released today,
suggests the cause is the widespread use of electronics at night.

About 95% of people use some type of electronics in the hour before bed,
whether it's watching TV, surfing the internet, playing video games or texting.
The youngest generation of adults, Gen Y'ers (19 to 29 year olds), are the
biggest users of interactive electronics, like cell phones and the internet. They
are more than eight times as likely as baby boomers (46 to 64 year olds) to text
in the hour before bedtime--52% of them texted compared to 5% of boomers.
About 19% of respondents sent or received work related emails before bed.

What do electronics have to do with sleep deprivation--and job performance? The

National Sleep Foundation surveyed 1508 people and found:

People who text before bed were less likely to get a good night's sleep, more
likely to wake up tired, to be characterized as sleepy, and more likely to drive
while feeling drowsy.
Three quarters of those over 30 who reported not getting enough sleep said
their sleepiness affected their work.

Source: http://www.cbsnews.com/news/sleep-deprivation-the-surprising-causes-andsolutions/
Technological or medical advances:
The committee recognized that along with the continued leadership of the National
Center on Sleep Disorders Research, a coordinated strategy is required to ensure
continued scientific and clinical advances. There must be incremental growth in the
capacity of the field to meet the public health and economic burden caused by sleep loss
and sleep disorders. This strategy will require concurrent commitment to the following
activities:
Increase awareness of the burden of sleep loss and sleep disorders among the
general public by developing a multimedia, comprehensive education campaign
on the health and economic impact of sleep loss and sleep disorders
Expand awareness among health care professionals through education and
training.
Establish the workforce required to meet clinical and scientific demands of the
field.
Develop and validate new and existing diagnostic and therapeutic technologies.

Expand accreditation criteria to emphasize treatment, long-term patient care, and

chronic disease management strategies.
Increase the investment in interdisciplinary sleep programs in academic health
centers that emphasize long-term clinical care, training, and research.
Create a national research network that connects individual investigators, research
programs, and research centers.

Source: https://www.iom.edu/~/media/Files/Report%20Files/2006/Sleep-Disordersand-Sleep-Deprivation-An-Unmet-Public-Health-Problem/Sleepforweb.pdf
Culture or Populations:

Older adults are able to retain better cognitive functioning during sleep
deprivation than young adults, according to a research abstract that will be
presented on Wednesday, June 10, at SLEEP 2009, the 23rd Annual Meeting
of the Associated Professional Sleep Societies.

Results indicate that older adults (ages 59 through 82 years) showed more resiliency to total
sleep deprivation (TSD) than young adults (ages 19 to 38 years) on a range of measures of
cognitive performance, including working memory, selective attention/inhibition and verbal
encoding and retrieval. Performance of young adults significantly declined on all three tasks
during TSD while that of older adults did not change significantly.
According to principal investigator Sean Drummond, PhD, at the UCSD/VA healthcare system in
San Diego, Calif., older adults may have performed better because only very healthy people were
included from that age group, which may have caused a selection bias that does not exist in
younger adults.
"It may be that older adults who remain the healthiest late in life are less vulnerable to a variety of
stressors, not just sleep loss," said Drummond.
The study included 33 older adults and 27 younger adults. The performance of older and younger
adults was compared on three distinct cognitive tasks before and after 36 hours of sleep
deprivation.

According to Drummond, sacrificing sleep to study or work is a false-trade off; findings

of this study and many others show that sleep deprivation produces impaired
performances across a variety of different tests.
Source: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/06/090610091333.htm