This 6-year follow-up study shows that significant elevated risks of both the first RTC event only and repeated RTC events for CMV drivers with T2DM are found. Drivers who used medication with insulin secretagogue or insulin sensitizers were related with increased risk of repeated RTC events. This finding clearly provides health policy evidence that recommendations for CMV drivers with insulin-treated diabetes and their medical attendants are needed. It used a prospective cohort study design, including the clear time ordering, information of DM and receiving blood glucose-lowering therapy, systematic traffic collisions data collection, consideration of recurrent traffic collision events, and control for confounding factors, especially for the percentages holding a driving license and sleep apnea.
RTC risk of diabetes and diabetes on insulin medications
Some studies have reported that elevated RTC risk appears in drivers with diabetes,6 7 14-16 whereas other studies have reported no risk.3-5 9 17 Among them, some studies recorded that accident rates in motor vehicle drivers with diabetes are reported to be a lower risk than those treated with oral antidiabetes agents.7 14-18 A study combined a retinopathy screening and RTC data from police to assess RTC risk in drivers with or without DM. It did not find that drivers with insulin-treated diabetes were at increased risk.17 However, this study has several deficiencies including incomplete recodes about actual percentage of situation for the time or the distance driven. This would produce biased misclassification. A Canadian study used health insurance coverage data and driving insurance programs to examine crash risk in older drivers.15 This study observed a slightly elevated crash risk for older drivers with diabetes in insulin treatment (odds ratio=1.4, 95% CI:1.0-2.0) relative to non-users, and 1.3 times the odds ratio (95% CI: 1.0-1.7) for sulfonylurea and metformin combined. In another Canadian National Population Health Survey study, the authors used self-reporting of diabetes status and insulin treatment to assess the association for RTCs. It was not a significantly association between participants with diabetes treatment and self-reported a history of RTCs in the preceding 12 months.9
A study from Canadian evaluated DM drivers who had been reported driving accidents between 2005 and 2007 to their licensing authority.16 This study provided the evidence that a history of severe hypoglycemia and diabetes diagnosis at later age were major risk factors for motor vehicle collision. The study showed that there was a 26% increase in the relative risk of a crash for each 1% reduction in HbA1c.
Cox et al. used case-control study design to compare drivers with T1DM, T2DM, and diabetes treatment with spouses of subjects with no diabetes on self-reporting crash accidents.7 In the previous 2 years, the percentage of driver’ s accidents was 19% in drivers with T1DM, 12% in drivers with T2DM, and 8% in the spouses as controls. A higher rate of accident was observed in drivers with T1DM than in either of the other groups, but in drivers with T2DM was not different to controls. Moreover, drivers with T1DM presented an elevated risk of driving-related mishaps compared to drivers with T2DM, regardless of insulin treatment status.
A Norwegian study evaluated RTC risk in drivers with diabetes using the database for the completely adult population (3.1 million) over 2 years. It found over 170,000 were taking anti-diabetes medications. People with insulin-treated diabetes showed a standardized incidence ratio (SIR) of 1.4 (95%CI: 1.2-1.6), and 1.2 (95%CI: 1.0-1.3) for oral glucose‐lowering agents.14
Signorovitch et al. assessed associations between hypoglycemia and risk of RTC among people with T2DM who were not being used insulin treatment from a national based employer claims database (1998–2010). The result showed that the risk of RTCs positive elevated (hazard ratio=1.82) in American people with a history of treating a hypoglycemic episode, but the anti-diabetes medications being used were not reported.19
A meta-analysis included 15 case-control studies assess the risk of RTC rates in DM drivers.8 This study did not find a significant elevated risk for drivers with diabetes. However, another meta-analysis of 25 studies showed a 1.56 times the relative risk of RTC for drivers with diabetes.20 The researchers believe the inconsistent results may result from the considerable heterogeneity in the design of these studies, such as incomplete data of participants at risk of hypoglycemia (mainly those with insulin-treated diabetes) and participants with or without driving licenses. Our comprehensive and prospective cohort study may supply extra evidence regarding T2DM-related accidents.
Moreover, management of DM patients is progressively aiming at near normoglycaemia. However, the consequence of more aggressive treatment might cause more frequent hypoglycemic episodes in diabetic drivers.11 21 The Swiss survey found a case fatality rate for sulfonylurea-induced hypoglycemia of 4.3% among 116 admissions.21 The risk of sulfonylurea-induced hypoglycemia appears from the Swiss survey to be greater for some agents than for others. The UK Hypoglycemia Study Group recorded continuous glucose monitoring over a period of up to 1 year to test the hypothesis that diabetes type and duration of insulin treatment influence the risk of hypoglycemia. Severe hypoglycemia was relatively common in patients treated with a sulfonylurea, and gradually increased for prolonged duration of insulin treatment in T2DM. Moreover, it was the higher frequency in people with long-standing T1DM who had a rate of 3.1 episodes per year in a patient.11 The principal reason is that the risk of hypoglycemia is related with glucose-lowering agents, particularly the insulin secretagogues, the sulfonylureas and glinides. This evidence supports our findings that the higher OADs dose levels with insulin secretagogue (sulfonylureas) or insulin sensitizers (biguanide) were associated with increased risk of RTCs.
Guidelines for Driving Licenses
According to experiences and methodologies between different regions of the world 2 22 23 24, the potential problems associated with driving and diabetes needs to be highlighted. Governments should be encouraged to adopt methods to assess and review medical fitness to drive for people who are being treated with insulin. Possible strategies include:
- Legislative restrictions on driving licenses for medical disorders in order to remove those at intolerable high risk when driving.
- Improve healthcare providers’ awareness and knowledge about diabetes and driving mishaps. The last strategy is to teach this information to DM drivers to prevent future RTCs.
- Transportation owner and drivers with diabetes should be made more aware of the potential risks they have associate with driving and have the opportunity to modify their approach to driving if they have drivers training education.
- Transportation owner and drivers with diabetes should regularly monitor blood glucose before or under driving conditions of driving by using a glucose meter with a storing function to long-term keep levels of blood glucose.
Limitations
This study still has some limitations and unavoidable uncertainties in the methodology of this investigation. First, the study only included male CMV drivers; thus, it limits the interpretation of the results with female drivers. Second, this study did not assess the short-term effect of OADs intake for RTC risk, such as hypoglycemia events. It was not possible to directly assess blood glucose values in this long-term follow-up study. Third, the dosage of OADs had been only used as a proxy for the severity of DM in this study. The researchers cannot prove the direct relationship between the higher doses of OADs used and hypoglycemia events. Finally, this study did not assess the combined effect of different kinds of OADs.
Conclusion
An increased risk of RTC associated with T2DM and receiving blood glucose-lowering therapy (insulin secretagogue and insulin sensitizers) in CMV drivers were found. In the future, a regular screening guidelines or recommendation for CMV drivers with insulin-treated diabetes and their medical attendants should be established.