Teens with Anxiety, Mood Disorders Less Likely to Get Driver’s License

The following is excerpted from an online article posted by HealthDay.

Teenagers suffering from anxiety, depression or bipolar disorder are likely to have a tougher time getting their driver’s license, a new study finds.

Teens and young adults with these types of mood disorders are 30% less likely to obtain a driver’s license than peers without a mood disorder, researchers report in the journal JAMA Network Open.

Youths with mood disorders also have nearly twice the risk of losing their license and a slightly elevated risk of crashing a vehicle, the researchers discovered.

“Our results indicate that newly licensed youths with mood disorders have a greater risk of crashing than other young drivers, but that this is a manageable risk,” said senior researcher Allison Curry, an associate professor of pediatrics with the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) Center for Injury Research and Prevention.

For the study, researchers compared nearly 1,900 teens with mood disorders to more than 84,000 teens without such a disorder, all of whom were eligible to get their license.

They linked the teens’ electronic health data with New Jersey driver licensing and crash data, to see how a mood disorder might affect driving.

They found that teens with mood disorders were significantly less likely to get a license.

Source: HealthDay
https://www.healthday.com/health-news/child-health/teens-with-anxiety-mood-disorders-less-likely-to-get-drivers-license