Lawson Research is adding to an ongoing debate after a new study found that when it comes to at least one routine procedure, modest sleep deprivation doesn’t adversely impact surgery.
Gall bladder surgery is the most common operation performed at Ontario hospitals like the London Health Sciences Center.
And Dr. Christopher Vinden and Lawson researchers wanted to know if modest sleep deprivation led to more surgical complications.
"It's mundane procedures, mundane tasks that are the most susceptible to sleep deprivation. If you want to give a person a complex task they can usually up their game," Vinden says.
It's a very controversial question. Should surgeons be operating if they're not at peak performance as a result of modest sleep deprivation?
The study looked at 94,183 gall bladder surgeries performed in 102 community hospitals in the province.
More than 2,000 of the procedures were performed by doctors who had operated between midnight and 7 a.m. the night before the surgery.
These so-called ‘at-risk’ surgeries were compared with four other procedures done by the same surgeon when they hadn't operated the previous night.
The findings were surprising.
Vinden says "We aren't seeing an effect in terms of complications in our administrative databases."
Study co-author Danielle Nash says several outcomes were measured.
"If there was bleeding for the patient or some kind of puncture, so something that would likely be a physician mistake and then also we looked at if there was death."
Vinden says the study has implications for health care spending.
"To implement a system such that surgeons who’ve been up all night couldn't operate would become very expensive. Small communities wouldn't be able to have their operating rooms open one day, their hospital coverage some days unless they hired a whole bunch more surgeons."
The study is published in Tuesday’s edition of the Journal of the American Medical Association.
