Anyone with a medical condition should know that it could impact their ability to drive safely. Discussing your options with your doctor can help you make the personal decision to keep driving or to modify your transportation arrangements to decrease your accident risk. While some accidents are truly accidents, serious medical conditions like epilepsy mean that you need to be able to control the condition with medication to drive safely.
But what happens if you don’t yet know that you have epilepsy?
The most common form of epilepsy in the population today is a risk factor for car crashes but not everyone who has this form of epilepsy is necessarily diagnosed with it. Very subtle symptoms can exist in patients that go undiagnosed for long periods of time up to a few years. A recent study looked at the impact of epilepsy on vehicle accidents. Researchers said that the failure to recognize these subtle symptoms of epilepsy is the main reason for a delay in diagnosis.
Oftentimes this condition is not diagnosed until it progresses to whole body spasms. A number of patients in this most recent study had experienced car crashes prior to their diagnosis. Researchers have estimated that earlier diagnosis of epilepsy could prevent more than 1800 car crashes all over the world every single year. If you have been in an accident recently and it was caused by another person’s negligence or a medical condition, you’ll have plenty of questions for a lawyer.
A San Francisco car accident attorney should be contacted as soon as possible.