Comprehensive tests needed to determine driving safety in patients with glaucoma
Click Here to Manage Email Alerts
SAN FRANCISCO — Glaucoma is associated with an increased risk for motor vehicle collisions, but more advanced methods of testing are needed to determine the level of driving safety in individual patients, according to a speaker here.
“The problem is, at what level of disease severity are [patients] really at high risk?” Felipe A. Medeiros, MD, PhD, said at Glaucoma Subspecialty Day at the American Academy of Ophthalmology meeting.
According to Medeiros, traditional assessment methods such as standard automated perimetry do not present an accurate predictive value for individual patient risk factors for daily activities due to a lack of scene complexity and minimal distractions.
Instead, tests should measure a patient’s useful field of view (UFOV), or “the area over which a person can extract information in a single glance.”
These assessments include virtual simulations in which patients must complete challenging tasks such as driving while using a cell phone and navigating other reckless drivers, which may help highlight vision shortcomings caused by glaucoma.
“It’s not only measuring the area where you can physically see a stimulus, but actually the area over which you can detect, recognize, process and respond to that stimulus,” Medeiros said.
Medeiros and colleagues developed an assessment, the Performance-Centered Portable Test (PERCEPT), which tasks patients with performing demanding dual vision tasks at low contrast. PERCEPT showed better predictive ability in detecting patient risk levels for motor vehicle collisions than UFOV tests, highlighting the importance of accounting for changes in contrast, according to Medeiros.
“A more comprehensive evaluation should then be performed, developing all the functional tasks like divided attention, contrast sensitivity and visual crowding so we can better understand when glaucoma patients get impaired to drive,” he said.
Collapse
Medeiros FA. Glaucoma and driving safety. Presented at: American Academy of Ophthalmology meeting; Nov. 3-6, 2023; San Francisco.
Read more about
Click Here to Manage Email Alerts