Australian researchers claim to have developed a blood test that can accurately detect when someone has not slept for 24 hours.
A Monash University-led team says a blood-based marker accurately predicted when the study volunteers had been awake for more than 24 hours under controlled laboratory conditions.
The biomarker detected whether individuals had been awake for 24 hours with a 99.2 percent probability of being correct, when compared to their own well-rested sample. When a single sample was considered without the well-rested comparison (similar to a diagnostic blood test).
Researchers are hoping their findings could be used to develop future tests to quickly and easily identify sleep deprived drivers.
The research was led by senior author Professor Clare Anderson while she was with the Monash University School of Psychological Sciences and Turner Institute for Brain and Mental Health. She is now Professor of Sleep and Circadian Science at the University of Birmingham in the UK.
“This is a really exciting discovery for sleep scientists, and could be transformative to the future management of health and safety relating to insufficient sleep,” she said. “While more work is required, this is a promising first step.
“There is strong evidence that less than five hours’ sleep is associated with unsafe driving, but driving after 24 hours awake, which is what we detected here, would be at least comparable to more than double the Australian legal limit of alcohol performance wise.”
First author Dr Katy Jeppe, from the Monash Proteomics and Metabolomics Platform, previously from the School of Psychological Sciences, spoke of how a test could potentially be developed for post-accident use.
“Next steps would be to test it in a less controlled environment and maybe under forensic conditions, particularly if it was to be used as evidence for crashes involving drivers falling asleep,” Jeppe said.
“Given it’s blood, the test is more limited in a roadside context, but future work could examine whether our metabolites, and therefore the biomarker, are evident in saliva or breath.”
“Much further work would be needed if laws were to change and a sleep deprivation test introduced on the road or in workplaces. This would include further validation of biomarkers, as well as establishing safe levels of sleep to prevent and recover from impairment, not to mention the extensive legal process.”