Towards the development of a saliva test for fatigue

While French Minister for the Interior Bernard Cazeneuve announced in January 2015 the general rollout of saliva tests to detect driver drug use, a study is looking at using saliva tests to detect fatigue. A team at the Paris Hôtel-Dieu hospital’s Sleep and Attention Centre has been working for several months on developing these tests to detect sleep deficit.

This study, funded by the VINCI Autoroutes Foundation for Responsible Driving, is hoping to measure potential sleep deficit markers in the saliva of a group of 50 subjects before and after partial sleep deprivation, as suffered by many drivers.

Driver drowsiness is the main cause of fatalities and is implicated in one of out of every three accidents. The VINCI Autoroutes Foundation is continuing to promote improved knowledge of this risk that is all too often underestimated by drivers. It had already sponsored a project run by the Hôpital Raymond-Poincaré in Garches, that showed that each driver had lost an average of 20 minutes sleep a night in the past fifteen years.

For more information

• Les conducteurs français perdent l’équivalent d’une nuit de sommeil par an (French drivers lose the equivalent of one night’s sleep a year) (In French only)
• LeFigaro.fr / Angélique Négroni – Vers la mise au point d’un test salivaire pour évaluer la fatigue (abonnés) (Work on a saliva test to assess fatigue) (Accessible only to Le Figaro subscribers) (In French only)