Benzodiazepine-related traffic accidents in young and elderly drivers

✍ Scribed by I. Neutel

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 1998
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 112 KB
• Volume: 13
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0885-6222
• DOI: 10.1002/(sici)1099-1077(1998110)13:2+<s115::aid-hup56>3.0.co;2-o

✦ Synopsis

The relation of BZD use to impaired driving skills has been well established by both experimental and epidemiologic studies. There has been a concern that elderly people might be more aected than younger people, but for this the empirical evidence is less clear. The present study will examine the dierences in risk of injurious trac accidents after BZD use in older adults (60) compared with those younger. Also the dierences in eect of short acting and long acting BZD and, more tentatively, dierences in eect of ®rst-time and long term will be considered. The study design is an epidemiologic cohort study for which data was received from the Saskatchewan Health Data Bases. The study population consists of 225 796 persons above 20 with a ®rst BZD prescription, and 97 862 controls. All ®rsttime users were eligible for entering the repeat users cohort if they received three prescriptions within any 5 month period. New users increased their risk of injurious trac accidents within the ®rst 4 weeks of the BZD prescription at an OR 3Á1 (1 . 5±6 . 2). Persons under 60 had a risk of OR 3Á2 (1 . 3±8 . 1), while older people had OR 2Á8 (1 . 0± 8 . 4). For individual BZD, ¯urazepam showed the largest increase in risk at OR 5Á 1; strati®ed for age the OR was 6 . 1 for the under 60 and 3 . 4 for the over 60 age groups. The number of trac accidents in the repeat use population was very small, but they hint at the possibility that repeat users have a lower risk than new users. These results need to be con®rmed and the recommendations are that further studies be done to ferret out relations among the various potential in¯uences of age, type of BZD and length of use.