Drug for sleepy shift workers

Modafinil, a drug used to treat narcolepsy and excessive sleepiness resulting from sleep apnoea, helps reduce sleepiness due to 'shift-work sleep disorder' (i.e. excessive sleepiness during night work and insomnia when trying to sleep during the day).Researchers from the Harvard Medical School in Boston randomly assigned 209 shift-workers with chronic sleep disorder to take modafinil or an inactive placebo before the start of each shift. The researchers found that modafinil, compared with placebo, reduced the extreme sleepiness observed in study subjects and led to a small but significant improvement in performance. The improvement with modafinil in shift-work sleep disorder patients was comparable to the improvement with modafinil in patients with narcolepsy. Modafinil did not have an adverse impact on daytime sleep. Despite these benefits, patients treated with modafinil continued to have high levels of sleepiness and impaired performance at night.

Also, researchers from Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York said that the above study did not adequately assess the clinical value of the drug in shift-work sleep disorder, nor did it justify writing more prescriptions for modafinil. Rather, it serves as a wake-up call for the design and implementation of further scientific studies to address in a cohesive manner the serious health and safety issues that surround us by virtue of our having become, to a large extent, a shift-working society. However, with further studies modafinil can be shown to be an effective and safe addition to the treatment of shift-work sleep disorder, they concluded.

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