ANTI-ANXIETY DRUGS INCREASE CRASHES

LONDON (AP) -- Drivers taking commonly prescribed anti-anxiety drugs
such as Valium are more than twice as likely to be involved in traffic
accidents as those not taking the drugs, a new study says.

The risk of accidents for people under the age of 45 is more than
three times greater for those who take the drugs, according to the
research, published in Friday's edition of the British medical journal
The Lancet.

``The current warnings are that if you feel drowsy, don't drive. That
needs to be changed,'' said Dr. Tom MacDonald, a clinical
pharmacologist from the University of Dundee in Scotland who led the
study. ``I would say: If you use these drugs, don't drive.''

Thousands of lives could be saved worldwide every year, and hundreds
of thousands of traffic accidents avoided, if people who use such
drugs did not drive while on medication, the researchers said.

Tranquilizers such as Valium, generically known as diazepam, are
commonly used to treat anxiety, other stress-related disorders and
muscle spasms.

They are the most commonly prescribed tranquilizers, with 18 million
prescriptions in Britain alone in 1997. Worldwide figures were not
available.

Patients usually feel drowsy on these drugs in the first few days of
taking them, but accidents occur at the same rate regardless of
whether drowsiness occurs, MacDonald said.

A spokesman for Hoffman LaRoche, the Swiss maker of Valium, said his
company's warning labels are very clear.

``Patients should be cautioned against engaging in hazardous
occupations requiring complete mental alertness, such as operating
machinery or driving a motor vehicle,'' spokesman Jeff Soper said,
reading from a Valium label at the company's U.S. headquarters in
Nutley, N.J.

He said he was not familiar with the Lancet study. However, ``one
would hope that patients would have an understanding of when they
should be behind the wheel of a vehicle,'' Soper said.

Dr. Desmond O'Neill, a geriatrician at the Center for Mobility
Enhancement at Adelaide and Meath Hospital in Dublin, Ireland, viewed
the study's conclusions with caution.

``They've made us think hard, but it still isn't enough evidence to
tell people not to drive,'' he said. ``Is it the illness or the
medication? If you're that agitated that you need the drug, maybe
that's the problem.''

In conducting the study, the researchers compared the records of all
prescriptions dispensed in the Dundee area with the 19,386 traffic
accidents the local police responded to between April 1992 and June
1995. A total of 1,731 people involved in those accidents were taking
one of the drugs examined in the study.

Of the accidents involving those 1,731 people, four included
fatalities. Of those, three drivers were taking anti-anxiety drugs on
the day of the accident and the fourth driver had taken anti-anxiety
drugs during the study period.

MacDonald said that extrapolating from those figures, he estimated
that thousands of lives could be saved worldwide if drivers avoided
the drugs.

The researchers, after determining when the patients began to take the
drugs, were able to compare the patients' chances of having an
accident before and after they started the prescriptions.

The researchers looked at four groups of medications. Besides
anti-anxiety drugs taken during the daytime, they also examined
antidepressants such as Prozac, and other drugs, including sleeping

pills, that act on the brain.

Only the anti-anxiety drugs were associated with an increased risk of
traffic accidents. Antidepressants showed no link and neither did the
sleeping pills, except for one, zopiclone. The researchers were
uncertain why, but speculated that perhaps its effects took longer to
wear off.

Similar results have been found by U.S. researchers studying the link
between anti-anxiety drugs and an increased risk of traffic accidents,
but those studies addressed only drivers over the age of 65.

Checked-by: Rich O'Grady