A new research study shows that perhaps we should keep an eye on that
pesky “pregnancy brain,” and how it affects our driving.
The study
suggests that women who are pregnant have more car accidents than in the
years before or after pregnancy.
The study, published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal,
found that pregnant women are more susceptible to vehicular accidents
during the second trimester, a time, according to the study, that women
begin to feel many of the effects of their pregnancy, and they may not
drive as safely as they would with a late-term pregnancy belly.
One of
the authors involved in the study attributes the increase in accidents
to the cognitive impairment that many women experience during pregnancy,
most commonly known as “pregnancy brain.” Donald Redelmeier, a
researcher at the Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences in Toronto
says “All those changes could contribute to driver error.”
Redelmeier and his colleagues studied the records of more than 500,000
women in Ontario who were pregnant and gave birth.
These women were
tracked for four years before their pregnancy and one year after their
children’s birth.
Researchers looked at each car crash that occurred
during that time period that was serious enough to send the woman to the
emergency room.
Before their pregnancies, the amount of these serious
vehicle accidents for all of the women who drove was approximately 177
per month, which works out to an annual rate of 4.5 per 1,000.
That
number did not change during the first month of pregnancy. However, by
month four of the pregnancy, the same women were involved in 299 serious
vehicle crashes per month, working out to an annual rate of 7.6 per
1,000.
By the last month of pregnancy, that rate dropped to 2.7 per
1,000, and continued to stay low during the year following the birth of
the women’s children.
Redelmeier believes that the rate stayed low
because the new mothers likely drove less, or had their newborns in the
car with them.
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