Some nurses skip sleep for 24 hours

NASHVILLE, April 15 (UPI) -- Some U.S. hospital nurses go without sleep for as much as 24 hours while adjusting to working night shifts, the least effective strategy, researchers say.

Karen Gamble, an assistant professor at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, says the study was based on questionnaires from 388 nurses who work at the Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville. About 25 percent of the nurses say they went without sleep for 12 hours before working a 12-hour shift, the study says.

"I was very surprised to find that nurses' second most frequent strategy was the 'no sleep' strategy that often involved staying awake for the 12 hours before starting the night shift," Gamble, who worked on the study as a post-doctoral fellow at Vanderbilt, says in a statement. "That means they are skipping sleep for at least 24 hours straight."

Since the nurse shortages of the 1980s, hospital nurses who care for inpatients often do so from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. and the night shift covers 7 p.m. to 7 a.m.

Vanderbilt night shift nurses typically work a schedule that includes three days on night shift followed by two to five days off, when most switch back to a normal sleep cycle. That means most of them are shifting sleep cycles as frequently as twice a week.

The study, published in the journal Public Library of Science One, found variations in individuals' circadian clock genes have a discernible impact on the nurses' ability to adapt.