Epilepsy and driving

Abstract

Epilepsy is a disease with high prevalence, which interferes driving and may lead to car accident; This case-control study has been done on 100 epileptic patients and 100 persons as control group, who had history of driving. We gathered our patients with face to face interview and registering their information in special forms which were prepared for this study. There were three times more accidents among epileptic cases comparing with control group and this difference was more considerable in men and in patients under 35 years old. The cause of accident were not seizure attack in more than 60% of the patients and these ordinary accidents were also more in case group. Epileptic patients with history of car accidents during driving had poor drug compliance comparing with the epileptics without history of an accident so drug compliance may be valuable in predicting accident in these patients. We have also found poor drug compliance in whom seizure attacks caused accident for them. 58% of the epileptics had not consulted their physician about driving. 43.3% of seizures during driving were of generalized type and none of the patients had inform police about their disease during getting driving license