Dementia causing accidents galore in Australia

By Sid Astbury Jul 6, 2005, 3:17 GMT

Sydney - As many as 100,000 car accidents in Australia each year involve an elderly driver with dementia or the pre-dementia condition called mild cognitive impairment.

Older drivers with mild dementia given a driving test had a failure rate of more than 70 per cent, a study funded by the Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB) found.

Chief researcher Carol Snellgrove, a clinical psychologist at the Repatriation Hospital in Adelaide, said the results showed that even drivers with low-level dementia have their licences cancelled.

"Those people who had mild cognitive impairment, which is the stage between normal cognitive age and early dementia, 50 per cent of those participants failed the on road driving test," she told national broadcaster ABC. Of those with early dementia, three- quarters failed.

"I would describe those figures as potentially catastrophic," Dr Snellgrove said. She estimated that 100,000 crashes in Australia each year were caused by mild cognitive impairment or early dementia."

Ella Glazebrook from Alzheimer's Australia said it would be wrong to take licences away from all those with early dementia.

"Obviously we don't want to see anyone injured on the roads but where that step is taken prematurely we often see a huge loss of self-esteem and worth on the part of the person with dementia," she said.

Glazebrook argued that each individual's driving ability should be assessed rather than that of a group because early dementia affects different people in different ways.