Soheil Saadat, Iraj Alimohammadi, Mojgan Karbakhsh, Hassan Ashayeri, Farideh Sadeghian, Shahrbanoo Goli, Mahsa Fayaz,
Volume 8, Issue 2 (6-2018)
Abstract
Introduction: Impairment of alertness, attention and performance associated with sleepiness and fatigue in nurses occur in night and long-term shifts that in the end of night shift reach to the maximum level can lead to traffic accidents when they returning home. The purpose of this study was to determine the effect of night shift on psychomotor abilities of driving in nurses after shiftwork.
Material and Method: A cohort study was carried out on 23 night shift and 24 day shift female nurses aged 20 to 40 at Sina Hospital in Tehran city, using the Vienna Test System (VTS). The concentration and selective attention, reaction time, pheriperal perception, and coordination before and after night and day shifts were measured. A multiple linear regression model and Backward stepwise selection method was used for analyses.
Result: In the concentration and selective attention test, sum hits (p = 0.038) and in the visual perception test , divided attention (p =0.006) and visual field (p =0.019), and in the reaction time test the mean motor time (p =0.034) showed a significant adverse relationship with working in night shift, but the visomotor coordination variables did not show any significant correlation.
Conclusion: The results showed that the concentration and selective attention, peripheral perception, and reaction time of psychomotor ability of driving were significantly adversely impaired in nurses after night shift. These results in evidence of the mechanism of increasing traffic accidents after night shift among nurses added to the previous studies in this subject.
Milad Abbasi, Mehran Pourhossein, Hamzeh Mohammadi, Farideh Golbabaei,
Volume 10, Issue 3 (8-2020)
Abstract
Introduction: Many studies have been carried out on the effects of heat stress on cognitive functions, but the results are contradictory. Therefore, this study was conducted to review the effect of heat stress on cognitive functions.
Material and method: In this study, all English articles conducted on effect of heat stress on cognitive, perceptual, and psychomotor functions from 1970 to 2018 were reviewed. For this, articles with keywords such as heat strain, heat stress, cognitive function, memory, comprehension, psychomotor, reaction time, mental performance, mood, mental response, error, task performance, fatigue, alertness, hyperthermia, and heat exhaustion in the Scopus, Web of Science, Science Direct, Pub Med, Springer, Wiley Online Library and ProQuest databases were searched. Out of 157 retrieved articles, 39 articles were finally reviewed according to the inclusion criteria.
Results: Out of 157 retrieved articles related to the topic, according to the inclusion criteria, 39 articles were finally considered for review. Among this articles, 9 (%23) articles were published before 2000 and 30 (%77) after 2000. Two articles were in athletes, four articles (%10.2) in workers, four articles (%10.2) in students, four articles (%10.2) in military soldiers and twenty-five articles (%64.2) were conducted in ordinary people.Based on the results, heat stress was identified as a detrimental factor for decreased cognitive functions such as reading comprehension, memory, focus, mathematical processing, tracking test, reaction time, perception and decoding text and numeric messages, visual alertness, mental computing, text reading , hidden figures test and verbal fluency.
Conclusion: Based on the results of these studies, heat stress has been introduced as a detrimental factor for disrupting cognitive functions, but conclusion based on the results of studies is a systematic method is difficult because many confounding variables such as type of work, exposure time, skill and adaptation plays a big role.
