A new study found that the results of elective medical operations scheduled during the morning are not affected by surgeons coming in from night shifts.

Previous studies have suggested that physicians, who are deprived of sleep may cause harm to patients. Nonetheless, the effects of sleep loss in doctors remains unclear. Now, a new Ontario-based study delved into the said premise by assessing the outcomes of the care rendered by physicians during elective morning surgeries, after going on a night shift.

The researchers conducted the study by performing a population-based and retrospective investigation involving about 38,978 surgical cases under the care of 1,448 experienced surgeons. A total of 40.6 percent of the study subjects were treated at an academic facility. The 12 types of operations monitored by the researchers varied widely and included bypass surgery, angioplasty, hysterectomy and hip replacement. The researchers were able to determine whether the surgeon worked from 12 a.m to 7 a.m. before the daytime surgery through a billing code database.

The findings of the study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, show that there were no differences noted in the primary outcomes set by the researchers including the number of deaths, readmissions and occurrence of complications between patients whose surgeons worked the night before and those whose surgeons did not. No notable differences in the outcomes of the investigations were reported whether the place of the operation was performed in an academic or non-academic facility. The age of the physician, as well as the type of surgical procedure performed did not contribute significant differences as well.

The results of the study now serves an argument against propositions that suggest physicians to declare to their patients whether they are sleep-deprived or not, Dr. Nancy Baxter, lead author from the University of Toronto wrote in an email to Reuters Health.

The study neither identified nor measured how much sleep the surgeons had, comments Dr. Charles Czeisler, chief of the division of sleep and circadian disorders at Brigham and Women's Hospital. He conducted a 2009 study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), which suggested that surgeon's mistakes may triple if the actual hour of sleep were to be considered.

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