==== Front
Innov Aging
Innov Aging
innovateage
Innovation in Aging
2399-5300 Oxford University Press US 

10.1093/geroni/igaa057.509
igaa057.509
Abstracts
Session 2883 (Poster)
Cognitive Impairment and Cognition
AcademicSubjects/SOC02600
Do Memory Problems in Older Drivers Impact Driving Frequency in Metro Versus Non-Metro Communities?
Orr Tyler 1 Rupper Randall 2 1 
Brigham Young University--Provo, Provo, Utah, United States
2 
Salt Lake VA, Salt Lake City, Utah, United States
2020 
16 12 2020 
16 12 2020 
4 Suppl 1 Program Abstracts from The GSA 2020 Annual Scientific Meeting “Turning 75: Why Age Matters”156 156
© The Author(s) 2020. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Gerontological Society of America.2020This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.Abstract
Perceived memory problems may cause older adults to limit functional activities such as driving. For those individuals living in non-metropolitan communities, greater distances between activities, lack of public transportation, and fewer support systems may make reducing driving frequency less feasible. We hypothesized that older adults in non-metropolitan communities would be more likely to continue frequent driving even if they also perceived memory problems. We used the National Health and Aging Trends Study to examine the association between reported memory difficulty and the frequency of driving. These data were then stratified by metropolitan versus non-metropolitan classification using both ordinal logistic regression and Chi-Squared testing. In both metropolitan and non-metropolitan communities, respondents were more likely to report reductions in driving frequency if they also reported memory problems. However, in both metropolitan and non-metropolitan communities, the majority of respondents reporting fair or poor memory continued to report frequent driving; and, there were no statistical differences in frequency of reported driving between metropolitan and non-metropolitan respondents. These analyses suggest that strategies are necessary in both metropolitan and non-metropolitan areas to help older drivers with perceived memory difficulties to recognize when they need to limit driving. Further research is necessary to determine which strategies are likely to be effective in metropolitan and/or non-metropolitan communities.