Parkinson's Study

ABSTRACT
For people with Parkinson’s, navigating a new route while driving uses the cognitive resources of the individual and may impair their driving ability. The objective of this study was to assess the navigation ability and safety errors among people with Parkinson’s Disease during a route following task.
The study consisted of 77 people with mild-moderate Parkinson’s and a control group of 152 individuals who were neurologically normal. All had current drivers licenses and had been driving for at least 10 years.
On cognitive, visual and motor tests, the group with Parkinson’s scored significantly lower than the control group, making wrong turns, getting lost or committing at-fault safety errors. It is assumed that the Parkinson’s group’s
They were recruited from the Movement Disorder Clinic at the Department of Neurology, University of Iowa, and the Veterans Affairs Medical Centre in Iowa City. All participants were licensed active drivers, and all still lived independently.
The control group, consisting of 152 neurologically normal elderly participants (75 males and 77 females), were all licensed active drivers.
A driver’s habit questionnaire was administered to determine how many miles each person drove per week. There was no notable difference between the control group and the PD group in driving habits.
All participants had been driving for more than 10 years. Anyone who had stopped driving prior to the study, or who had acute illness or medical conditions such as vestibular disease, alcoholism or drug dependency, or other neurological diseases that might lead to dementia, were excluded from the study. In addition, individuals taking any investigational drug, within 60 days prior to the study, or dopaminergic blockers, within 180 days prior to the study, were excluded.
All testing was conducted during times when the subjects would normally be
Similarly, drivers with PD made more incorrect turns, committed more at-fault safety errors, and got lost more often. They also required more trials to learn the route correctly and took a longer time to finish the task. As well, drivers with PD drove slower than the control group on a straight segment of the drive, when no secondary task was administered.
There were no significant differences between the groups in other vehicular control measures, such as speed and steering variability.
The results of this study supported the hypothesis that the cognitive demands of a RFT increase the likelihood that drivers with PD will make more navigational errors than neurologically normal elderly individuals. The findings also supported the idea that cognitive and visual dysfunction is associated with driver safety errors. CONCLUSIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS FOR FURTHER RESEARCH
This study reflected the fact that more highly educated PD drivers performed normally on the RFT, suggesting that further research might be considered to explore the differences in responses of people with PD from varying educational