The rate of fatality for Alzheimer’s among ambulance and taxi drivers is 3x lower than the general population. This is not observed in other transportation-related careers.
The connection is believed to be the spatial reasoning involved in routing. No causative link is suggested.
One of the first signs that a somebody has Alzheimer's is that they'll get lost. E.g., they've been attending church on Thursdays nights at the same chapel for 15 years, but suddenly they forgot how to get home after a recent service. Part of the reason for the findings in the current study is that people quit those professions when they feel themselves starting to struggle.
Is the profession cached in the data when they leave the job? And does the data attribute 2 entries for someone with 2 careers. That’s the question I think
They explain it in the article. Someone, often the funeral director filling out the death certificate, asks what the deceased did for most of their working life.
I’m a little skeptical of the category “ambulance drivers; not emergency medical technicians” as reliably coded, because people will often say so-and-so “drove an ambulance” when they were actually an EMT or paramedic. But it’s also not clear to me that would invalidate the findings.
It seems a lot of people already know that. I remember their's a claim that Taxi drivers hipocampus is larger than average people. A memory method called "Memory palace" or "Method of Loci" exists for 2 thousand years exploiting human's navigation capability.
I was really expecting this to be higher not lower due to factors like particulate inhalation from exhaust/brake dust/tire particles. Also there's a lot of sedentary-type problems you get while taxi driving like bad diet habits that are not conducive to brain health.
Dunno, did taxi driving for a few years. Mostly suburban for a small fleet, not gigging. I'm thinking newer drivers that rely on smartphones for navigation won't get the same benefit.
I seem to recall that at least some populations of taxi driver they have exams like The Knowledge (https://london-taxi.co.uk/the-knowledge/) where changes in structures of the brain can be measured after learning it.
- Is significant life-long usage of real-time mental spatial navigation protective?
- Are those who end up in these positions self-selected for better than average real-time mental spatial navigation and that above average performance correlates with protection against Alzheimer's.
Anecdotal, but I've spoken with many taxi and ride-share drivers, and my impression is that their decision to seek out and continue that line of work is almost always driven by outside economic considerations. I've never heard someone base their decision on their ability to perform the job.
At my most recent EMS job ("ambulance driver" is considered insulting), the younger people couldn't navigate anywhere without mapping it. Some of them brought up being amazed that I could get to every hospital in our area from pretty much anywhere without having to bring it up on my phone (random houses and nursing homes were a different story).
The connection is believed to be the spatial reasoning involved in routing. No causative link is suggested.
I’m a little skeptical of the category “ambulance drivers; not emergency medical technicians” as reliably coded, because people will often say so-and-so “drove an ambulance” when they were actually an EMT or paramedic. But it’s also not clear to me that would invalidate the findings.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci
Dunno, did taxi driving for a few years. Mostly suburban for a small fleet, not gigging. I'm thinking newer drivers that rely on smartphones for navigation won't get the same benefit.
I seem to recall that at least some populations of taxi driver they have exams like The Knowledge (https://london-taxi.co.uk/the-knowledge/) where changes in structures of the brain can be measured after learning it.
- Is significant life-long usage of real-time mental spatial navigation protective?
- Are those who end up in these positions self-selected for better than average real-time mental spatial navigation and that above average performance correlates with protection against Alzheimer's.
Anecdotal, but I've spoken with many taxi and ride-share drivers, and my impression is that their decision to seek out and continue that line of work is almost always driven by outside economic considerations. I've never heard someone base their decision on their ability to perform the job.
That could even be a form of therapy after diagnosis (which seems to become easier with biomarkers).