Pre-frailty associated with traffic crashes in Japanese community-dwelling older drivers

Abstract

Objectives: Frailty might be useful to identify older drivers who are at risk for traffic crashes. We aim to examine the association between pre-frailty/frailty defined by the Kihon Checklist (KCL) and the involvement of traffic crashes and clarify whether some domains of the KCL are associated with traffic crashes.

Methods: This cross-sectional study analyzed data from 2,208 Japanese community-dwelling older drivers aged ≥ 65 years in Kasama City, who participated in our postal survey in November 2019. A self-reported history of traffic crashes was used to divide participants into non-crash-involved and crash-involved groups.

Results: A total of 192 (8.7%) participants had been involved in traffic crashes in the past year. The crash-involved group was found to have gained more body mass index, driven more frequently, and scored higher on the total KCL score than the non-crash-involved group (all P < .05). Binary logistic regression analyses showed that after adjusting for age, sex, education, driving frequency, and driving distance, pre-frailty (OR = 1.52, 95% CI: 1.10–2.10) was more significantly associated with traffic crashes as compared to robustness. Those who had impairment in the oral domain (OR = 1.57, 95% CI: 1.09–2.27) and memory domain (OR = 1.38, 95% CI: 1.01–1.90) were also more likely to be involved in traffic crashes.

Conclusion: The results suggest that identifying pre-frailty may play an important pole in crash prevention. Additionally, more attention should be given to older drivers with oral dysfunction and cognitive impairment.

Keywords:

• Aging
• frailty
• traffic accidents
• driving safety

Acknowledgments

We gratefully thank participants who devoted their time during the postal survey and Kasama city officials for their cooperation.

Disclosure statement

The authors have no conflicts of interest to disclose.

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are available on request from the corresponding author. The data are not publicly available due to privacy or ethical restrictions.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology of Japan under Grant-in-Aid for Young Scientist (18K13035) and Grant-in-Aid for Japan Society for the Promotion of Science Fellows (19J14505).