Hot Off The Press:  Driving and Aging, A Key Intersection
From time to time in this space, I plan to deviate from the overall plan of reviewing the many health concerns of Seabrookers in a systematic way - namely looking at the primary life threatening problems we face like Heart Disease, which we are addressing each month.The deviations will be in response to the readers questions, to some major health issue on our island, or simply because there is new information that might be of interest to our readers.

This month I am responding to two distantly related, but perhaps related "news" items.  The first is the decision of the Sea Island Intersection Committee to create a "modified roundabout" intersection where the Betsy Kerrison, Kiawah Island and Seabrook Island Parkways and proposed Andell Development access intersect.  The second news comes from the May issue of the medical Journal of the American Geriatrics Society which published two scientific papers and one editorial on making driving safer (less crashes!) for older drivers. 

I don't know about you, but one of the things that I have always found challenging, if not dangerous, are the true roundabouts in England and in our nations capital, where we lived for two years.  I always enter these marvels of engineering with trepidation if not sheer fear since the roundabout seems to bring out the most aggressive behaviors of all intersections and certainly are a puzzle for tourists and those not familiar with them.  Be that as it may, it looks like we will have a modified roundabout, modifications being to help those of us fearful of them to more safely navigate the intersection.  Certainly, we will not have the frustration of waiting for a traffic light to change color - and who doesn't enjoy the fact that Seabrook has no traffic lights?

Nevertheless, the majority of people driving at Seabrook will probably fall into the category called "older" which the medical writers have studied.  Simply put investigators at the University of Alabama Birmingham and Yale, independently have attempted to learn more about ways for us (physicians and lay people) to identify people who are at risk of having a car accident.  This is, of course, important to Seabrookers as well as all Americans since when adjusted for miles driven, older individuals have more crashes than younger aged groups, involving more injuries, hospitalizations and death.  The prevailing belief is that all or certainly most automobile accidents can be prevented and if one can identify those at greatest risk, perhaps accidents can be prevented!

The papers in the Geriatrics Journal identified some simple ways to possibly identify risk factors for driving problems in the  older driver.  The first and most obvious is vision and reaction to visual keys.  Interesting, near vision seems more predictive than distant vision (which is what the State Highway Department tests for) but both visual tests are closely related.  Other factors which seem to predict accidents are a fall in the past 2 years, neck range of motion, and visual attention (simulating scanning the visual field for road hazards while driving).  Factors which are not predictive of accidents (at least in the authors' study population) and which might surprise you are hearing deficits (so why do people blow their horns up North?), cognitive function (we should have known that intelligence and even memory aren't necessary for driving), and many medical problems including all of the common ones that older Americans have. 

So how does the medical news fit with the Sea Island Intersection Committee decision for a modified roundabout.  If we can see near and far,  if we don't have to turn our heads, and if we can react quickly to the confused person in front and on the side of us, we should be just fine.