DRIVING, DRUG RESEARCH AND THE PHARMACEUTICAL-INDUSTRY

It is known that psychoactive drugs may produce impairment of attentio n and skills involved in driving performance and thus may increase the risk of traffic accident involvement. Several reliable and sensitive methods are available to assess different aspects of driving performan ce in safe conditions. They include various laboratory tests which exp lore psychomotor performance and cognitive functions (selective and di vided attention, speed of reaction, sustained attention), electrophysi ological measures (spectral analysis of resting EEG, multiple sleep la tency test, saccadic eye movement) and other more complex measures suc h as driving simulators and on-the-road actual driving tests. Various combinations of these techniques should be used to demonstrate potenti al drug-induced changes in driving or skills related to driving in sta ndardized placebo-controlled studies with healthy volunteers and/or pa tients. In my opinion, in addition to efficacy, behavioural toxicity s hould be assessed during drug development in order to obtain a reliabl e evaluation of the benefit/risk ratio for the patients and should be included in the registration file of all new psychoactive drugs. (C) 1 998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.