BEIJING, Jan. 11 (Xinhuanet) -- Getting out of bed in the morning may be the most dangerous move you make all day, a new US medical study has found.
According to researchers at the University of Colorado, grogginess after waking should be treated more seriously for how it impairs thinking and memory skills ¡ª and the implications for doctors, firefighters and other staff roused straight into action upon waking.
"If a person is awakened suddenly, by a fire alarm for example, motivation alone may be insufficient to overcome the effects of sleep inertia,¡± said Kenneth Wright, an assistant professor at the University of Colorado.
The research showed that short-term memory, counting skills and cognitive abilities were impaired in the groggy period, known as sleep inertia. In fact, the study says, people newly awakened perform as badly as or even worse than if they were drunk.
The study, published Wednesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association, is the first to quantify the effects of sleep inertia. "The cognitive skills of subjects were worse upon awakening than after extended sleep deprivation. For a short period, at least, the effects of sleep inertia may be as bad as or worse than being legally drunk," Dr Wright said.
The performance was found to be significantly worse in people who had just woken up after eight hours' sleep than those who had been awake for more than 24 hours.
"It takes some time until we're able to be efficient in our ability to make decisions and think clearly," said Dr Wright.
The researchers found that the subjects did more poorly on the tests in the moments just after waking from a normal night's sleep. "We thought that (their performance) would be just as bad as sleep deprivation, but we were a little surprised that it was worse," Wright said. "The serious effects are probably gone within the first 10 minutes, but we still can detect impairments for up to two hours."
Why does sleep have this effect? Researchers aren't sure, said Dr. Robert Vorona, an assistant professor of sleep medicine at Eastern Virginia Medical School. "Although sleep inertia is ubiquitous, it has not been extensively studied and its cause is not clearly understood." Enditem
(Agencies)
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