This article caught my eye for personal and professional reasons. As a full time ENT trainee working 24-hour on-calls, I also have young children who have never slept through the night and don’t respect weekends or days off. My FRCS revision took place between midnight and 3am over a recent twelve-month period. Sleep deprivation is my normal state of existence, and I’m sure I’m not alone. But back to the paper… This study from India aimed to observe the effects of 24 hours of sleep deprivation on temporal processing and frequency resolution in 16 healthy adults. Local ethical approval was acquired, and a number of tests were carried out on the subjects. A paired T-test was used to demonstrate statistical significance of the results of all tests between the two conditions, with p<0.005. The authors acknowledge that the reduced scores may be due to the effects of sleep deprivation on working memory, arousal, attention, concentration etc, and recommend that clinicians should take proper care in diagnosing a patient if sleep deprivation is a factor. This was a very small but neat study, which could lead onto some interesting further research. In the meantime though, I’ll keep in mind that sleep deprivation – my patients’ and mine – can have a serious effect on cognitive function. Goodnight.
