Effects of acute caffeine consumption following sleep loss on cognitive, physical, occupational and driving performance: A systematic review and meta-analysis

Irwin, Christopher; Khalesi, Saman; Desbrow, Ben; McCartney, Danielle · 2019 · OpenAlex-citations

DOI: 10.1016/j.neubiorev.2019.12.008

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Summary

This systematic review and meta-analysis investigates the efficacy of acute caffeine consumption as a countermeasure for performance impairments caused by sleep loss. Motivated by the widespread use of caffeine to mitigate the cognitive, physical, and occupational deficits associated with sleep deprivation or restriction, the study aims to quantify these effects across various performance domains. The authors sought to determine whether caffeine improves specific metrics such as attention, reaction time, executive function, memory, and driving performance, while also examining how dosage and duration of wakefulness influence these outcomes. The researchers conducted a comprehensive literature search of PubMed, Web of Science, and Scopus databases from inception to September 2018. They identified 45 publications comprising 57 trials and 988 participants, yielding 327 effect estimates. Inclusion criteria required placebo-controlled experimental trials involving adults with no known medical conditions, who underwent sleep loss defined as ≤6 hours of sleep per 24-hour cycle. Performance was assessed within six hours of caffeine administration (or 12 hours for slow-release formulations). Data synthesis utilized random-effects models to calculate Hedges’ g effect sizes, with meta-regression analyses performed to assess the impact of caffeine dose and wakefulness duration. The results demonstrate that caffeine significantly improves performance across multiple domains following sleep loss. For cognitive tasks, caffeine yielded large effects on information processing speed (g=1.95) and reaction time (g=1.11), and medium-to-large effects on attention speed (g=0.86) and accuracy (g=0.68). Executive function showed a medium improvement (g=0.35). In simulated driving scenarios, caffeine produced large improvements in both lateral (g=1.67) and longitudinal (g=1.60) vehicular control. Meta-regression indicated that higher caffeine doses generally correlated with larger effect sizes for reaction time, attention, executive function, and driving performance. While most studies reported benefits for memory, crystallized intelligence, occupational, and physical performance, these outcomes were not meta-analyzed due to heterogeneity or limited data. Notably, some studies observed small detrimental effects on specific physical endurance tasks and executive function measures, though these were outliers in the broader dataset. The study concludes that acute caffeine ingestion is an effective countermeasure against the cognitive and physical impairments associated with sleep loss. The findings suggest that doses ranging from less than 80 mg up to 600 mg can provide likely positive effects, although the magnitude of benefit is task-dependent and often dose-responsive. These results support the use of caffeine to maintain performance in contexts requiring sustained wakefulness, such as driving or occupational duties, while highlighting the need to consider dosage and specific performance requirements when implementing caffeine as a mitigation strategy.

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• sleep deprivation