0000000000866732
AUTHOR
Gian Domenico Pinna
Determinants of Sleepiness at Wheel and Missing Accidents in Patients With Obstructive Sleep Apnea
Study ObjectivesMotor-vehicle crashes are frequent in untreated OSA patients but there is still uncertainty on prevalence as well as physiological or clinical determinants of sleepiness at the wheel (SW) in OSA patients. We assessed determinants of SW or sleepiness related near-miss car accident (NMA) in a group of non-professional drivers with OSA.MethodsA 237 consecutive, treatment-naïve PSG-diagnosed OSA patients (161 males, 53.1 ± 12.6 years) were enrolled. Self-reported SW was assessed by positive answer to the question, “Have you had episodes of falling asleep while driving or episodes of drowsiness at wheel that could interfere with your driving skill in the last year?” Occurrence of…
Surrogate Data Analysis for Assessing the Significance of the Coherence Function
In cardiovascular variability analysis, the significance of the coupling between two time series is commonly assessed by setting a threshold level in the coherence function. While traditionally used statistical tests consider only the parameters of the adopted estimator, the required zero-coherence level may be affected by some features of the observed series. In this study, three procedures, based on the generation of surrogate series sharing given properties with the original but being structurally uncoupled, were considered: independent identically distributed (IID), Fourier transform (FT), and autoregressive (AR). IID surrogates maintained the distribution of the original series, while …