SALT LAKE CITY – Commercial truck drivers with three or more medical conditions have a far higher chance of being in a crash than healthier drivers, according to a new study.
The study, led by investigators at the University of Utah School of Medicine, said such drivers could be up to four times as likely to be involved in a crash.
The results were published in the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine.
“What these data are telling us is that with decreasing health comes increased crash risk, including crashes that truck drivers could prevent,” said the study’s lead author, Matthew Thiese, an assistant professor at the Rocky Mountain Center for Occupational and Environmental Health.
Keeping healthy can be tough for truck drivers, who typically sit for long hours behind the wheel, deal with poor sleeping conditions and have a hard time finding nutritious meals on the road.
Now, examination of medical records from 49,464 commercial truck drivers found that 34 percent have signs of at least one of several medical conditions that had previously been linked to poor driving performance, including heart disease, low back pain and diabetes.
Millions of data points
Matching drivers’ medical and crash histories revealed that drivers with at least three of the flagged conditions were more likely to have been involved in a crash. There were 82 truck drivers in the highest-risk group, and results were calculated from millions of data points reflecting their relative crash risk every day for up to seven years.
The investigators found that this group was at higher risk for different categories of crashes, including accidents that caused injury, that could have been avoided.
The rate of crashes resulting in injury among all truck drivers was 29 per 100 million miles traveled. For drivers with three or more ailments, the frequency increased to 93 per 100 million miles traveled, according to Thiese.
The trends held true even after taking into consideration other factors that influence truckers’ driving abilities such as age and amount of commercial driving experience.
The new findings could mean that one health condition, such as diabetes, is manageable but diabetes in combination with high blood pressure and anxiety could substantially increase a driver’s risk.
“Right now, conditions are thought of in isolation,” Thiese said. “There’s no guidance for looking at multiple conditions in concert.”
Current commercial motor vehicle guidelines pull truckers with major health concerns from the pool but do not factor in an accumulation of multiple minor symptoms.
Considering that occupants of the other vehicle get hurt in three-quarters of injury crashes involving trucks, it’s in the public interest to continue investigating the issue, said the study’s senior author Dr. Kurt Hegmann, director of the Rocky Mountain Center for Occupational and Environmental Health.
“If we can better understand the interplay between driver health and crash risk, then we can better address safety concerns,” he said.
OOIDA disputes findings
But not everyone agrees with the study’s findings.
The Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association Foundation pointed out several weaknesses in the study.
First, the foundation gives credit to the study’s authors for admitting that the conclusions are not definitive because of the small sample size and for saying that care should be taken when interpreting the true crash risk based on the results.
The foundation said some of the reasons the results of the study could be flawed are that all of the drivers were from one motor carrier, they didn’t examine where the miles were driven, and many of the medical conditions are associated with each other and not necessarily exclusive.
The study also didn’t look at total driving experience. The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration recently released an analysis that indicated drivers with more experience were less likely to crash. There are 5.7 million drivers of commercial motor vehicles in the United States, according to the study. Based on police reports, there have been 60,000 truck crashes involving injuries in the past five years, the study said.
“The fact remains that crashes are rare events, and the crash rate for each of the groups (i.e., the number of conditions) were relatively similar, but the study did not break down the results by crash rates,” the foundation said. “Thus, it cannot be said that just having a medical condition will result in a crash. If this were true, considering the health of the United States as a whole, the highways would be strewn with wrecked vehicles.”
