A new study shows that surgeons who lack sleep before an operation do not make more mistakes than those who have enough hours of sleep.
Researchers led by Dr. Christopher Vinden from the London Health Sciences Center-Victoria Hospital in London, Ontario found that patients undergoing gallbladder surgeries were not highly at risk of complications when the surgeon who performed the operation did not get enough sleep before the schedule.
They looked at billing records of 331 general surgeons from 102 community hospitals in Ontario. In over seven years, those surgeons carried out 2,078 gallbladder removals the day after they had performed operation overnight.
Vinden's team evaluated each surgeon's results with four other gallbladder removals the surgeon performed after a night off at work. Generally, the researchers found no difference in complication rates.
Hence, those sleep deprived surgeons had roughly two percent of patients who shifted to an invasive, open surgery from an invasive surgery during the operation. Additionally, less than one percent had an injury, such as a prick of cut in a blood vessel or nearby organ, which resulted on surgeon error.
Vinden told Philly.com, "What we know from the [research] on sleep deprivation is that mundane tasks seem to be the most affected." Moreover, "Surgery is not a mundane thing," he added.
However, the study focused on gallbladder removal operation which is a very common surgery procedure.
"It's the most common procedure that general surgeons do," Vinden said. "So if sleep deprivation were to boost patients' complication risks, he said, you would expect to see the effect in gallbladder removals."
Smaller studies have found no other risks to patients when their surgeon has worked the night before. "But none have been as well done, or as large, as this one," said Zinner, who also agrees with Vinden's previous statements.
Zinner added that the study also take note of the "real rank-and-file" general surgeons who -- in both Canada and the United States – carry out the bulk of all surgeries done every year.
The study was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
