Selective Attention Most Impaired During First Night Shift Worked

Main Category: Sleep / Sleep Disorders / Insomnia
Article Date: 27 Nov 2007 - 17:00 PDT

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Our biological propensity for keeping awake during the day and sleeping at night makes night work a challenge. Now, researchers at Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH) have found that attention is especially affected during the first night shift. This research appears in the November 28, 2007 edition of PLOS ONE.

"It is important to identify this first night shift as being most vulnerable to impairment in attention, because critical jobs like medical care, airport baggage screening, law enforcement, and air-traffic control are routinely done at night." said Nayantara Santhi, a fellow in the Division of Sleep Medicine at BWH and lead author of the paper. "Additionally, traditional methods like exposure to bright light and fixed sleep schedule that reduce attentional impairment during night shift work are not as effective during this first night shift."

Researchers tested selective attention with visual search tasks in participants in a shift work simulation, which included four day shifts followed by three night shifts. They found that attention during the first night shift was the most impaired, with participants unable to stay focused on tasks. They were spending less time attending to search items and making more errors.

This research was funded by a grant from the National Heart Lung and Blood Institute.

Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH) is a 747-bed nonprofit teaching affiliate of Harvard Medical School and a founding member of Partners HealthCare System, an integrated health care delivery network. BWH is committed to excellence in patient care with expertise in virtually every specialty of medicine and surgery. The BWH medical preeminence dates back to 1832, and today that rich history in clinical care is coupled with its national leadership in quality improvement and patient safety initiatives and its dedication to educating and training the next generation of health care professionals. Through investigation and discovery conducted at its Biomedical Research Institute (BRI), BWH is an international leader in basic, clinical and translational research on human diseases, involving more than 800 physician-investigators and renowned biomedical scientists and faculty supported by more than $400M in funding. BWH is also home to major landmark epidemiologic population studies, including the Nurses' and Physicians' Health Studies and the Women's Health Initiative.

http://www.brighamandwomens.org.

Citation: Santhi N, Horowitz TS, Duffy JF, Czeisler CA (2007) Acute Sleep Deprivation and Circadian Misalignment Associated with Transition onto the First Night of Work Impairs Visual Selective Attention. PLoS ONE 2(11): e1233. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0001233
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