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L24 A Proposal For The Assessment Of Fitness To Drive In Patients With Huntington’s Disease
  1. N Valle Guzman,
  2. R Barker
  1. John Van Geest Centre for Brain Repair, University of Cambridge, Forvie Site, Robinson Way, Cambridge CB2 0PY, UK

Abstract

Huntington’s disease is characterised by a series of motor and cognitive impairments, many of which can affect driving abilities. In the UK, HD patients are obliged to inform the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA) if they have HD. The DVLA bases their decision on whether the patient is fit to drive on the consultant’s judgement. This has however been shown to not be very reliable, as a considerable number of patients that are judged to be fit to drive do not pass more elaborate driving assessments, which include on the road driving tests and visual and cognitive assessments. Administering all these assessments is expensive and time consuming, thus it is not feasible to use these in all HD patients that are currently still driving. With about 70% of patients with HD continuing to drive after disease onset, there is however a need for a battery of assessments that is easy to administer, and will assist the clinician in assessing fitness to drive. We here propose a battery to more reliably assess driving ability in HD. This battery includes tests that have been shown to be predictive of driving abilities, assessments that have demonstrated good correlations with actual on the road driving, and a series of questionnaires for both patient and carer/family member regarding real world driving situations.

KeyWords
  • Huntington’s disease
  • driving abilities
  • neuropsychological assessment

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