Cure Diabetes, Reduce North Carolina Auto Accidents Significantly?
What’s the link between chronic disease and car accidents in North Carolina and elsewhere? It’s an intriguing question – one that hasn’t been blogged about to death or discussed at length in the mainstream media. It’s no surprise that type 2 diabetes and associated diseases (e.g. obesity, Alzheimer’s disease) are on the rise in the United States. But when people talk about car accident safety – and crash prevention – they rarely, if ever, discuss how our diabetes/obesity epidemic (“diabesity epidemic”) might be creating hazards on the road.
Parsing the Statistics
Groups like the National Highway Traffic and Safety Administration keep tabs on injury accidents in North Carolina and elsewhere. For instance, it’s a famously repeated fact that car accidents kill approximately 40,000 people on US roads annually. But if you look just at stats regarding injury accidents and property damage, you can easily get misled. DUI-related deaths might be down from 15 years ago, for instance, but what can we attribute that to? Are people just driving DUI less? Or are people driving DUI the same amount but getting into fewer accidents because of improved auto safety features or road engineering changes? With a system as complicated as the North Carolina highway system, you can never really be sure what changes cause what results because of the dynamism of the interacting variables.
This is a long way of getting at a key point: the dangers caused by the increasing number of diabetic North Carolinians behind the wheel may be masked by other changes to our driving habits and behaviors and proclivities!
For instance, it could be that diabetic drivers are slightly more likely to get into injury crashes due to diabetes-related fatigue or blood sugar issues. But maybe enhanced car safety features, such as antilock brakes and better airbags, mitigate the effects of the diabetes-induced errors. In other words, if you just look at the statistics, there is too much noise in the data for us to come to any conclusions.
On the other hand, common sense suggest that drivers who are diabetic and fatigued and who suffer from blood sugar swings — and who also might be on diabetes drugs and thus subject to side effects related to those drugs — might be riskier drivers. It would also then follow that, if we could figure out ways to reduce the number of North Carolinian diabetics– or improve the treatment for these diabetics – then we could make a subtle but not insignificant dent in the number and severity of car crashes!
Of course, that’s all a lot of speculation. Until we have hard science and good data, we can’t really make any conclusive statements.
Nevertheless, this idea of expanding our thinking can be useful, particularly if you or someone you care about is involved in a North Carolina car crash, and you are trying to figure out how and why the accident occurred and what you can do to get compensation and move on with your life. Step one is getting good help: connect with the Law Offices of Michael A DeMayo today for a free consultation.
More Web Resources:
How Does Diabetes Affect Performance?
Diabetes and Driving
