Teen drivers suffer from 'can't happen to me' syndrome

A "can't happen to me" attitude may be the most dangerous thing riding in the car with a teenager, but there are plenty of other candidates, researchers are finding.

Recent studies show not only that many teens think their age and agility are enough to overcome poor driving conditions, but that if they do happen to get injured in a crash, medical care will probably save them.

And many feel their skills with electronic devices allow them to dial cell phones -- and text-message -- while driving.

In a report published last month in the Journal of the American College of Surgeons, Canadian researchers assessed the thinking of 262 high school students taking part in a one-day injury-prevention program.

The study found that the teens consistently underestimate risks in driving and are more likely to believe that vehicle and highway design are bigger factors in crashes than human error.

Dr. Najema Ahmed and colleagues at St. Michael's Hospital of the University of Toronto, put all of the students through the training, which included both instruction and a tour of a hospital intensive care unit, where the teens met a young person who had suffered either mild traumatic brain injury or a spinal cord injury.

All of the students completed a questionnaire about perceived driving risks, but a third of them did so before the training, another third eight days later and the rest 30 days later.

Those who completed the form eight days after training showed the best ability to pick safer options from various driving scenarios, with the skills decaying among those who were quizzed 30 days later.

Ahmed said the findings underscore the need to constantly reinforce safe driving messages to teens. "In addition to giving teens the knowledge and teaching them the technical skills, injury prevention programs must also address teens' attitudes among being immune to illness and death as a means of changing high-risk behaviors,'' the researcher said.

Another study, published this month in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, reviewed national youth behavior surveys done every two years by the government to look at which teens in cars are wearing seat belts.

Researchers from Meharry Medical College in Nashville, found that the use of seat belts among teens riding in cars as passengers is even more dismal than among teen drivers.

The surveys, done in 2001 and 2003, found that only 42 percent of high school students 16 and older said they always wore seat belts as passengers, while 59 percent said they always buckled up in the driver's seat. Only 38 percent of teens in the survey said they always wore seat belts wherever they sat in a car.

As for other distractions, several recent surveys suggest at least half of teen drivers admit to sending and receiving text messages while behind the wheel.

In fact, teens in one focus group that answered questions for a driving-habits study commissioned by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said they felt they were more capable of "multitasking" while driving than their parents, since they're more at ease using cell phones and other digital devices. Most said they've memorized their phones' keyboards well enough that they don't have to look down to type while driving. All of the nine participants also admitted to having had a close call while driving and attending to a cell phone or CD player. Five had actually had crashes.

Dr. Linda Lawrence, president of the American College of Emergency Physicians, said her colleagues around the country are seeing injuries not just from vehicle accidents, but also from teens and young adults who were texting while crossing busy streets, riding a bike, rollerblading, or even playing sports like baseball or soccer.

Behind the wheel, distracted driving for any reason accounts for about half of the 6 million crashes reported in the United States every year -- or maybe more.

A 2006 driver-tracking study that used cameras and sensors on 100 cars driven by 241 people for more than a year found 80 percent of wrecks and 65 percent of near-misses involved driver distraction within 3 seconds of the event.

While drowsy driving is a leading factor for inattention, the study from NHTSA and the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute found that the most common distraction for drivers in the study was cell phones, and that dialing (or pushing text buttons) on a hand-held was more than twice as likely to cause an accident or near-miss than talking on a phone.

On the Net: http://www.nhtsa.dot.gov

www.facs.org

www.ajpm-online.net

(E-mail Lee Bowman at bowmanl(at)shns.com. Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, http://www.scrippsnews.com)