Congratulations to Allison E. Curry, PhD, MPH and Emma Sartin, PhD, MPH, CPST for presenting at the Discussions Advancing Research in Transportation Safety (DARTS) meeting on January 7 about supporting the driving process for autistic adolescents. Watch this video about their work.
Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) and the New Jersey Division of Highway Traffic Safety (HTS) announce the creation of a center that will provide an unprecedented level of injury-related data.
Young adults with mood disorders were 30% less likely to acquire a driver’s license compared to their peers without mood disorders. Young adults with mood disorders had slightly higher overall crash rates at 12- and 48-months post-licensure and had double the rate of license suspensions compared to their peers without mood disorders. Research suggests the need to develop evidence-based training and education for adolescents with mood disorders who want to drive.
Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) and the New Jersey Division of Highway Traffic Safety (HTS) announce the launch of njsho.chop.edu and an innovative data dashboard bringing community-level traffic safety information to New Jersey.
Emily Dzieniszewski reflects on her time working as a graduate research assistant with the NJ-SHO Center. Emily used NJ-SHO data for her MPH capstone project.
The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia Research Institute's Cornerstone Blog highlighted Alli Curry's June 5th presentation on NJ-SHO research capabilities.
Z-drugs like zolpidem are taken at night to facilitate sleep but may cause sedation that affects driving the following morning. NJ-SHO researchers and Brown University collaborators used linked Medicare claims data and crash and licensing records to see if older drivers taking Z-drugs for 12 weeks were more likely to crash than those not taking Z-drugs. They did not find elevated risk of overall crashes, at-fault crashes, or crashes that occurred in the morning associated with a Z-drug prescription.
The Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development featured NJ-SHO research on driving outcomes among youth with mood disorders like depression and bipolar disorder. The research was funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
Understanding how many children are injured in crashes, as well as the types of injuries they experience, is important to advance child passenger safety. Linking New Jersey crash reports and hospital data revealed that crash reports often report inaccurate injury locations and tend to overstate the severity of injuries experienced. Very few children experienced any injury in a crash, and injuries were rare among children in harnessed child restraint systems.
The medical conditions and medications that make someone more likely to be involved in a crash do not necessarily make someone more likely to be injured in a crash. Using linked NJ-SHO data and Medicare claims data of older drivers, researchers found differences between crash-involved drivers with and without an injury. Researchers should consider linking multiple sources of crash information and make a clear distinction between predicting crash involvement and being injured in a crash.
Dr. Emma Sartin discusses the implications of an NJ-SHO study which found discrepancies between child passenger injuries in crash reports and in hospital records.
Although older adults may use potentially driver-impairing (PDI) medications that can produce psychomotor impairment, little is known about changes to PDI medication use among older adults from the time before to the time after a motor vehicle crash (MVC). Study findings suggest that most older drivers involved in MVCs did not use fewer PDI medications after crashes than before. Qualitative research of perceived risks versus benefits of PDI medications is necessary to understand why MVCs do not appear to motivate clinicians to deprescribe PDI medications.
