Road safety in drivers with Parkinson disease

Uc, E. Y.; Rizzo, M.; Johnson, A. M.; Dastrup, E.; Anderson, S. W.; Dawson, J. D. · 2009 · OpenAlex-citations

DOI: 10.1212/wnl.0b013e3181c67b77

archive: archived pipeline: cataloged verified

Get this paper ↗ (DOI — opens at the source; we link to it, we don't host it)

Summary

This study investigated road safety and its predictors in drivers with Parkinson disease (PD), addressing the clinical challenge of determining driving fitness in an aging population with increasing PD prevalence. The researchers hypothesized that drivers with PD would commit more safety errors than neurologically normal controls and sought to identify specific cognitive, visual, and motor factors associated with these errors. The study included 84 licensed, active drivers with PD (mean age 67.3 years, median Hoehn & Yahr stage II) and 182 age-matched controls. Participants underwent a comprehensive battery of off-road tests assessing cognitive, visual, and motor functions. They then drove a standardized 45-minute route through urban and rural settings in an instrumented vehicle. A professional driving expert reviewed video data to document safety errors, categorized into 15 types, with a primary outcome measure of total error count. Statistical analyses included Wilcoxon rank sum tests for group comparisons and multiple linear regression to identify predictors within the PD group, adjusting for demographics and familiarity with the driving environment. Drivers with PD committed significantly more total safety errors (41.6 ± 14.6) and serious errors (2.4 ± 2.3) than controls (32.9 ± 12.3 and 1.7 ± 1.6, respectively). Lane violations were the most common error category in both groups. While PD drivers performed worse on most neuropsychological and visual tests, group differences in certain error categories became nonsignificant after adjusting for familiarity with the local driving environment. Within the PD group, older age and poorer performance on tests of visual acuity, contrast sensitivity, attention, visuospatial abilities, visual memory, and general cognition predicted higher error counts. A multivariate model identified useful field of view (visual processing speed/attention) and far visual acuity as the strongest joint predictors of safety errors. Notably, 77.4% of PD drivers committed more errors than the median control, but 22.6% performed at least as well as the median control, indicating considerable variability. The findings confirm that drivers with PD generally exhibit poorer road safety, driven primarily by impairments in visual perception and cognition rather than motor dysfunction alone. Familiarity with the driving environment served as a mitigating factor, suggesting that graded licensure policies allowing driving in familiar areas may be viable for some patients. The identification of specific visual and cognitive predictors provides healthcare providers with objective tools to assess driving risk and advise patients, moving beyond diagnosis alone to evaluate functional capacity.

Provenance

The full processing record for this entry. Every stage of this paper's journey through the pipeline is logged — what ran, with which tool and model, how many attempts it took, and when it last completed.

Summary generated by qwen3.6-27b-prismaquant on 2026-06-26; verification: verified.

Topics

Ranked by relevance to this paper. Hover a topic for its definition.

• mci dementia driving
• cognitive impairment
• medical conditions