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• Posted December 17, 2024

Taxi Drivers' Brains May Leave Them Less Vulnerable to Alzheimer's

Taxi and ambulance drivers need to have quick wits and nimble reflexes to cut through traffic effectively.

Turns out that these traits might also protect them from Alzheimer’s disease, according to a new study published Dec. 16 in the BMJ.

“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,” 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.

Across all occupations, nearly 4% of those people died from Alzheimer’s disease.

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.

By comparison, about 3% of bus drivers and 4% of pilots died from Alzheimer’s, results show.

“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.

The hippocampus is the brain region that helps transfer short-term memories into long-term memory, 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 said. “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.”

More information

The Cleveland Clinic has more about the hippocampus.

SOURCE: Mass General Brigham, news release, Dec. 16, 2024