i n d u s t r y

Fatigue Study Deja Vu?

No, you’re not seeing double. Those reports on ABC’s World News Tonight and Good Morning America about truckers who don’t get enough sleep are based on the very same “Commercial Motor Vehicle Driver Fatigue and Alertness” study reported in the March 1997 issue of Heavy Duty Trucking and other industry publications. Recent stories have also appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post and other newspapers around the country, due in large part to coverage by the Associated Press.
Some of those stories confirm controversial assertions first noted in Heavy Duty Trucking. In its July 1996 issue, HDT reported that noted sleep researcher William C. Dement, M.D., Ph.D., claimed the study had documented truck drivers actually asleep behind the wheel. Though Dement, regarded as the father of modern sleep research, did not take part in the study, he told HDT he knew of the findings through colleagues who were involved.
However, the Federal Highway Administration, which had commissioned the study, told HDT at the time that no such instances of sleep had been recorded.
Asked about the apparent contradiction, a spokesman for the administration explained that the executive summary of the study, issued in January, described the instances as “sleep-like” states or “extreme drowsiness.” The problem, he said, was in varying definitions of sleep.
The specific episodes, he said, “would have been consistent with clinical criteria for Stage 1 sleep, the initial shallowest sleep stage, if the drivers had been in bed in a dark room.”
However, he also noted that in at least one of those instances, “the truck drifted across a lane boundary after the driver’s eyes had been shut for six or more seconds.”
The study was a seven-year, $4.5 million effort jointly sponsored by the U.S. and Canadian governments and their equivalent national trucking associations involving longhaul drivers very closely monitored by videotape and assorted medical equipment.
Why did the big-time media wait so long to pick up the story? Well, their reporters probably don’t read Heavy Duty Trucking, but they do get press releases on major stories in the New England Journal of Medicine, the leading U.S. medical journal. One such press release, from the National Sleep Foundation in Washington, DC, alerted major media to an article in the Sept. 10 issue of the journal entitled “The Sleep of Long-Haul Truck Drivers” by Merrill M. Mitler, Ph.D. and four colleagues who had worked on the study.
In the article, the researchers distilled their findings for fellow doctors around the country. The attendant major media, in turn, distributed the information to the world
ABC News, for one, did not mention the instances of sleep at the wheel. Media reports that did mention the finding downplayed it, perhaps after interviews with the authors and others involved in the study. Researcher C. Dennis Wylie, one of the study’s co-authors, told the Associated Press that instances of nodding off behind the wheel were “uncommon.”
However, Mitler had the opposite response when HDT asked about such reported instances. In a 1996 phone conversation, Mitler told HDT instances of actual sleep behind the wheel were to be expected in such a broad study. At that time, prior to the study’s release, however, Mitler declined to confirm any specific findings.
— John Bendel
Senior Editor