The Effects of Prescribed Analgesics on Driving

• Main Authors: Tiffany Got, Muhamad Bonse, Ryan Lewis, Bruce Haycock, Jennifer Campos, Behrang Keshavarz, Susan Gorski, Andrea Furlan
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Taylor & Francis Group 2019-03-01
• Series: Canadian Journal of Pain
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/24740527.2019.1591884

Introduction/Aim: Opioids have a broad impact on the central nervous system; side effects may impact the psychomotor and cognitive skills required for driving. This study aims to evaluate the impact of chronic short-acting opioid therapy on driving performance measures in a high-fidelity driving simulator. Methods: Adult chronic pain patients using short acting opioids (SAO) or not using any opioids (NO) were recruited from Toronto Rehab Hospital’s comprehensive integrated pain program. Participants completed a baseline off-road test battery assessing cognitive and visual function. After an acclimatization trial in the driving simulator, subjects completed three 10-minute-long scenarios under varying road conditions in the high-fidelity simulator (iDAPT DriverLab). Results: This ongoing study has evaluated 14 patients (SAO = 6, NO = 8) to date. The final sample size will increase to N = 40 to ensure test power. From the preliminary analysis, the SAO and NO groups were comparable on demographic variables, pain characteristics and performance on the cognitive and visual test battery. Vehicular control differed between groups; the standard deviation of lane position was 225.3 ± 55.4 and 256.1 ± 39.7 mm in the NO and SAO groups respectively. The brake reaction times were similar, 1111 ± 234 ms (NO) and 1107 ± 92 ms (SAO). Discussion/Conclusions: This study will complement the existing body of literature on driving and opioids, which is mainly composed of observational and epidemiological evidence, since it lacks high quality experimental studies and studies conducted in high fidelity driving simulators.