These Two Jobs Have Lower Alzheimer's Death Rates than Other Professions: Study

Taxi and ambulance drivers are at a lower risk of an Alzheimer's disease-related death, a new study finds.

Published in the British Medical Journal, the study,conducted by Mass General Brigham suggested that occupations that "demand real-time spatial and navigational processing, might be associated with reduced burden of Alzheimer's disease mortality compared with other occupations."

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“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 disease,” said lead author Vishal Patel, MD, MPH, a resident physician in the Department of Surgery at Brigham and Women’s Hospital.

Compared to the average death rate of Alzheimer's disease — 3.88% — taxi and ambulance drivers exhibited a significantly lower risk, the study found, with death rates of taxi drivers at 1.03% and ambulance drivers at 0.74%, respectively.

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However, other professions that require skilled navigation, like bus drivers (3.11%) or pilots (4.57%), did not show a significantly different rate of Alzheimer's disease-related death. Such jobs generally have predetermined routes, while taxi and ambulance drivers must quickly determine new routes many times a day. This led researchers to believe that real-time spatial processing is a key factor to these decreased death rates.

Being a taxi or ambulance driver won't automatically protect against developing Alzheimer's disease or dying from it but frequent behaviors within those professions could reveal information about preventing the illness.

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“We view these findings not as conclusive, but as hypothesis-generating,” said Anupam B. Jena, MD, PhD, a senior author on the study. “But they 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.”

The study examined causes of death of almost nine million people across a three-year period. It included 443 different occupations and accounted for age, sex, race, ethnicity and education.

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