A new study suggests that taxi and ambulance drivers have a significantly lower risk of death from Alzheimer's compared to over 400 other occupations. Researchers believe that the constant mental exercise of navigating routes may be protecting their brains.
Research shows that taxi drivers and ambulance drivers have a much lower risk of dying from Alzheimer's compared to over 400 different occupations. This trend wasn't observed in other transportation jobs that don't require navigating maps, like pilots or ship captains. Researchers believe that the mental exercise of planning a route in your head is particularly important in reducing Alzheimer's risk.
They theorize that the hippocampus, the part of the brain crucial for memory, is also responsible for sense of direction and navigation. Taxi and ambulance drivers have been shown in older studies to have particularly well-developed hippocampi, even as they age. Study author Dr. Anupam Jena, a physician at Massachusetts General Hospital, said their results suggest that 'it’s important to consider how occupations may affect risk of death from Alzheimer’s disease and whether any cognitive activities can be potentially preventive.' About 7 million Americans currently live with Alzheimer's disease, and according to the Alzheimer's Association, that number is projected to continue growing over the next decades to 13 million. Because ambulance drivers have to constantly navigate new routes to the hospital, they're exercising a part of the brain called the hippocampus, which is responsible for spatial reasoning, memory, and sense of direction. Each gray dot represents a different occupation included in their study. They didn't report which occupations had the highest incidence of dementia. But those with the lowest included taxi drivers and ambulance drivers. The new results were published in the British Medical Journal. The team gathered data from the National Vital Statistics System of over 8.9 million people who died over the 2020-2022 years. Of those deaths, about 348,328 were attributed to Alzheimer's
ALZHEIMER's OCCUPATION RISK BRAIN HEALTH MEMORY
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