Attentive Patients Can Drive Safely.

• Position: Alzheimer's disease and safe driving - Brief Article

Although previous studies have shown that Alzheimer's disease increases a person's risk for automobile accidents, not all individuals with mild dementia exhibit poor driving performance. Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis (Mo.) have identified specific aspects of attention that may help in determining whether such people can drive safely. "A demented older adult's attentional capacity can sometimes be quite reduced, which makes it much more difficult for that person to deal with the complex environment that driving creates," explains Janet Duchek, assistant professor of occupational therapy.

The investigators studied 136 participants recruited from the Washington University Alzheimer's Disease Research Center, all of whom still were driving at the time of the study, had a valid driver's license, no less than 10 years of driving experience, and corrected visual acuity of at least 20/50. The researchers administered various psychometric tests to access memory, intelligence, language levels, and an on-road driving test. They identified three visual tasks to test aspects of attentional processing that are important to driving. A visual search task, visual monitoring task, and useful field of view task were presented on a computer that recorded each participant's response.

The visual search task measures selective attention by determining whether a person can detect a target letter in an array of distracting letters. The visual monitoring task measures ability to sustain attention by asking a subject to spot infrequent changes in a moving display. The useful field of view task tests the ability to localize target information in the periphery. These tests were designed to simulate attentional capabilities that are important to driving, such as picking...