296 Sex differences in sleep and wakefulness of police officers working shifts: evidence from a field study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Introduction National reports of work-related injuries found the excess risk of work injury attributed to shift work to be significantly higher among women. The Working Time Society (WTS) concluded that male sex is one of the few factors that is “consistently associated with perceived or actual shift work tolerance”. However, it is unclear if physiological parameters are involved. Laboratory-controlled studies report sex differences in circadian rhythms (body temperature, melatonin). In sleep deprivation protocols, alertness and cognitive performances were affected by sex, menstrual cycle phase and hormonal contraceptives [HC] use. Nevertheless, field studies that compare male and female shift workers are scarce. Methods An observational study including 76 police officers working on patrol: 56 males and 20 females (11 using [HC], 6 not using [non-HC] and 3 with unknown use of hormonal contraception) aged 32.0 ± 5.3 years. Participants were followed throughout a month-long work cycle (1,457 morning, evening, night, or other shifts, plus rest days). They filled out time-stamped questionnaires (Samn-Perelli, KSS, Visual Analogue Scales, ~5/day; sleep and work-related information, ~1–2/day), completed 5-min Psychomotor Vigilance Tasks (PVT, ~2/day), and wore an actigraph to collect activity data. Linear mixed-effects models were used to analyze the effects of group, time awake and time-of-day on fatigue, sleepiness, alertness, mood and PVT measures. Results Self-reported measures and psychomotor performance significantly varied with time awake and time-of-day. Fatigue and sleepiness levels were significantly higher among female compared to male police officers, both with time awake and across the 24-h day. These variations were similar between non-HC females and the other groups. Compared to males, HC females were more fatigued and less alert, both with time awake and across the 24-h day, and sleepier with time awake. Having children at home did not explain these differences. Conclusion The results of this study expand our knowledge on the sex differences in the sleep and circadian physiology and demonstrate a critical effect of HC on women fatigue, sleepiness and alertness when working shifts. Sex and hormonal parameters must be considered in occupational medicine as well as in future laboratory and field studies on shift workers and circadian rhythms. Support (if any) IRSST, FRQS.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".