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Aging News & Information
Senior Citizens Who Give Up Driving may take Express
Lane to Nursing Home
'Taking the keys has
serious consequences for older drivers'
 July 19, 2006 - Although the slower driving habits
of some seniors often steam impatient younger motorists, researchers at
Johns Hopkins School of Medicine have found that elders who stay behind
the wheel are less likely to enter nursing homes or assisted living
centers than those who have never driven or who have given up driving
altogether.
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Aging News & Information |
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The Hopkins study findings, published in the July
issue of the American Journal of Public Health, included extensive
interviews conducted over a 10-year period with 1,593 seniors between 65
and 84 years of age who live in the small, Eastern Shore town of
Salisbury, Md.
"We are not recommending continuation of driving
for seniors who are a threat to themselves or others on the road," said
Ellen Freeman, Ph.D., an epidemiological researcher now working with the
Johns Hopkins Wilmer Eye Institute and the study's lead author.
"Instead, we hope that understanding the very real health impact that
losing the ability to drive has on seniors will encourage families to
plan contingencies to assist elderly members with transportation
issues."
The researchers also pointed out that losing the
ability to drive poses an especially significant hardship to seniors
living in isolated rural areas or any place without good, accessible
public transportation for the elderly.
"We set out to learn whether or not the loss of
driving ability played a measurable role in an older person's eventual
need for long-term care," said Sheila West, Ph.D., a professor of
ophthalmology at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. "The independence
that accompanies a driver's license and car has long been linked
anecdotally to a better quality of life for seniors."
Freeman and others on the Hopkins team stressed
that from both a personal and public policy standpoint, the need is
greater than ever to figure out what best and safely helps older people
keep an independent lifestyle. "The average annual cost of nursing home
admission is $69,000, and the price tag associated with entry into
assisted living is roughly $30,000," she noted. "That's a public policy
issue of huge dimensions as our population ages."
"This probably isn't so much about the process of
driving but rather the larger issue of mobility as it relates to a
person's independence," added Freeman. "When someone becomes a shut-in
due to the loss of their primary transportation, the likelihood that
they will require living assistance categorically increases."
Non-drivers across the entire age group studied had
four times the risk of long-term care entry compared to drivers, and the
absence of other drivers in the home doubled the risk of entering
long-term care. Nine percent of those studied entered long-term care for
three months or more. By the end of the study, 29 percent of men and 58
percent of women had no other drivers in the household, and 22 percent
of people who were driving at the beginning of the study reported that
they stopped driving during the study.
Freeman and her colleagues said their study methods
took into account and factored out many other causes of "long-term care
entry," including age, race, marital status and such health problems as
frailty, dementia and stroke damage. There were no significant
differences in outcomes between men and women.
"These findings point to the importance of research
into how to keep seniors driving and independent as long as is safely
possible," said West, director of the Johns Hopkins Initiative for
Translational Research on Driving and the study's senior author.
Salisbury, the site of the 10-year study, is a
semirural town of about 40,000 people. Freeman cautioned that because no
formal public transportation system was available to the residents of
the town, the findings of the study should only be interpreted as
meaningful for communities of similar size that also lack public
transportation infrastructure.
Editor's Notes:
Previous research done by Freeman showed that the
same group of people studied reported driving more than 3,000 miles per
year when they entered the study, with some already reporting changing
the way they drove, such as avoiding driving at night and to unfamiliar
places.
This study was funded by the National Institute on
Aging. The study's co-authors were: Stephen T. Gange, Ph.D., of the
Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and Beatriz Muςoz,
M.S., of the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.
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