Fatigue countermeasures caffeine

Unlike methylphenidate and pemoline, caffeine has been used as a fatigue countermeasure in operational environments. A survey of 125 aircrew members involved in flight operations over Iraq in 1992 indicated that sleep restriction and... 

The Walter Reed Army Institute of Research s Department of Behavioral Biology has developed a field-deployable version of a commercial Psychomotor Vigilance Task (PVT) that has been widely used in sleep research. The software runs on handheld PDAs running the Palm Operating System (Palm OS). It is modeled after the simple reaction time task of Wilkinson and Houghton,57 as modified by Dinges and Powell.58 The Palm OS version incorporates additional stimulus, feedback, control, and data options developed by Dr. Thome. In laboratory studies, performance on the PDA task has been shown to be sensitive to time-on-task fatigue effects, sleep deprivation, and circadian variation.18 Field studies have utilized the PVT to measure the efficacy of caffeine gum as a sleep loss countermeasure. 

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