Accident; analysis and prevention
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Review Meta Analysis
Analgesics and road traffic crashes in senior drivers: an epidemiological review and explorative meta-analysis on opioids.
To assess the epidemiological evidence associating the use of analgesics with the occurrence of road traffic crashes in senior drivers including a meta-analysis with specific focus on opioids. ⋯ The evidence is unconvincing in terms of number of studies, control of major confounders, and consistency of the results. The effect seen for opioids can be attributed to the lack of adjustment of key confounders such as concomitant illness or the consumption of alcohol or other psychoactive medications. There is a need for more efficient designs like larger population-based retrospective cohorts and nested case-control or case-crossover studies based on registers of high quality allowing adjustment for these factors and for the selection of unequivocal outcomes (e.g. drivers' responsibility) to produce more persuasive empirical evidence.