A new study suggests that taxi and ambulance drivers may have a lower risk of Alzheimer's disease compared to other occupations.
Taxi and ambulance drivers need to have quick wits and nimble reflexes to cut through traffic effectively. A new study published Dec. 16 found that these drivers may have a reduced risk of Alzheimer's disease. The same part of the brain that's involved in creating cognitive spatial maps -- which we use to navigate the world around us -- is also involved in the development of Alzheimer's, explained lead researcher Dr. Vishal Patel, a surgical resident at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston.
We hypothesized that occupations such as taxi driving and ambulance driving, which demand real-time spatial and navigational processing, might be associated with a reduced burden of Alzheimer's disease mortality compared with other occupations, Patel added in a hospital news release. However, the same benefit didn't hold for jobs that rely on following a fixed route, such as driving a bus or flying a plane, researchers noted. For the study, researchers analyzed death records of nearly 9 million people involved in 443 different occupations. The people all died between 2020 and 2022. But only 1% of taxi drivers and 0.7% of ambulance drivers died from Alzheimer's, researchers found. After adjustment, ambulance and taxi drivers had the lowest proportion of deaths due to Alzheimer's out of all the professions.Our results highlight the possibility that neurological changes in the hippocampus or elsewhere among taxi and ambulance drivers may account for the lower rates of Alzheimer's disease, said senior researcher Dr. Anupam Jena, a doctor at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston., according to the Cleveland Clinic. It also plays a role in navigation and emotional processing. However, researchers noted that this was an observational study and can't prove a direct cause-and-effect relationship between those careers and a lower risk of Alzheimer's. We view these findings not as conclusive, but as hypothesis-generating, Jena sai
ALZHEIMER's OCCUPATION TRANSPORT BRAIN RESEARCH
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