Location is very important here. London cabbies have to pass The Knowledge which is an extremely difficult memory exam that only people with particular kind of brain can do.
A number of the women in my wife's family have been diagnosed with Alzheimers. All of the women I know in her family also hate driving, because they find it very stressful.
It's plausible that people prone to Alzheimers are less likely to be comfortable driving.
Also, The Knowledge Test is, IIRC, passed only once and then you do not have to retake it for the rest of your career.
If a test passed in your 20s or 30s predicted accurately a much lower incidence of Alzheimer's in your 60s, that would be a remarkably strong early signal. Not impossible, but worth extra scrutiny. For the vast majority of old age conditions, we cannot predict them so long in advance.
That's yours speculation, isn't it?Because if so, it would corroborate the same conclusion, i.e. if you exercise your memory regularly, you are less likely to develop Alzheimer's.
When I was in my early 20s I had a job delivering pizza. I very quickly learned the delivery area, I knew pretty much every street and alleyway and shortcut to get from one place to another. Much smaller than London but I think the human brain is very good at remembering routes and where things are in an area, as this would have been an evolutionary advantage (go out hunting and be able to find your way back). No GPS, didn't even carry a map with me. We had a large map on the wall at the store, and if I had to deliver to a street I didn't recognize I'd find it on the map, see where it was relative to the streets I did know, and then I never had any problem finding places.
What? In my country at least (France), taxis have been a thing even in the countryside for as long as cars existed (or rather, as long as the telephone has). And I'd be very surprised if that wasn't also the case in most of Western Europe.
In fact it's a much easier job when it comes to routing and knowing your passengers' destinations than doing it in a metropolis.
As a bonus you can even set your general location on the mirror for extra accuracy, since the earth's magnetic line directions differ a bit based on location.
But in any case, I found that if you want to remember routes, it is far better to study the route before you begin driving, and then not rely on CarPlay altogether. This gives you much higher awareness of street names and directions.
Today this knowledge is arguably less useful.
My grandad essentially died of alzheimers and he just loved to sit and watch football all day where you don't really need to think much.
> Research on cognitive maps points toward the same conclusion as the study on taxi drivers. In 2023, researchers ran a machine learning model on more than 22,500 people in a national dataset and were able to predict which ZIP codes had higher rates of Alzheimer’s with 84% accuracy based on how complex the environment was. Those living in spatially complex surroundings – the kind that force active map building, such as dense street networks with numerous intersections, diverse points of interest and landmarks, and multiple path options – were less likely to develop Alzheimer’s.
And the second thing: What about modern taxi drivers that rely almost exclusively on GPS?
> After adjusting for age, sex, race, ethnicity and education, roughly 1 in 100 taxi and ambulance drivers died of Alzheimer’s, compared with 1 in 60 people overall
I would’ve thought the effects were more profound
Adjusting for educational attainment is an intriguing choice. If higher educational attainment were to decrease risk of Alzheimer's disease, wouldn't this adjustment optimise out the factor that they're looking for?
Otherwise very interesting results and conclusions. Also what's up with the outlying occupation on the left side of the 1st 2 charts on page 3: "Personal care and service workers, all other" with a mean age of death of 50.65?
In addition there's the social component of driving - you may not always want to talk to a Taxi driver but many people do. And ambulance drivers are often socializing with their colleagues
Driving also has a mix of reaction time based skills and hand eye and hand foot coordination. Overall it's pretty complicated.
Writing this I'm realising the final "Turing" test for AI might actually be just replacing the average Taxi driver. Can it drive a car, choose a route dynamically based on day and traffic and weather, and have a conversation with a wide variety of people and topics all at the same time ?
Such a small number of outcomes matter because statistical precision depends on the number of relevant events. With only 10 Alzheimer’s deaths, even a small change in the count could substantially alter the estimated association.
Taxi drivers provided more robust data, with 171 Alzheimer’s deaths among 16,658 decedents, but death-certificate Alzheimer’s mortality may not reflect how often taxi drivers develop the disease. Differences in diagnosis or cause-of-death reporting across occupations could influence the observed association.
The large overall sample does not eliminate uncertainty in the much smaller occupational subgroups, particularly among ambulance drivers.
Nonetheless, this is an interesting study and merits further investigation.
Or did you mean Dance Dance Revolution?
That's plenty of time to be a full blown alcoholic.
For example, airline pilots do not have a reduced level of alzheimers deaths, and that _certainly_ is not a place where you can coast with dementia.
And taxi drivers have _increasing_ anti-Alzheimer signals - with time, the areas that are known to diminish grow _more_.
The opposite of this is how sleep and unconsciousness allows the brain to perform cerebrospinal fluid transfer based maintenance routines via the glymphatic system, and why sleep is important to neural health.
https://www.science.org/content/article/scientists-uncover-h...
Second rule - Got edge case? Got headline!
What the hell. I passed all the test for driving cabs in Stockholm, Sweden. I had to memorize 20 regions in the city. I wonder if this requirement applies to all taxi drivers, including Uber.
At least in the US, Uber and Lyft basically went around the taxi cartels. I'd assume that it wasn't easy for that to happen in Sweden though.
Every 60 seconds or so I'd be teleported to a fresh location in the maze and given an instruction like "find the green door". I have no idea how I did compared to the other participants, but I found the maze/task to be both difficult and not at all fun.
Also video games in general are pretty derivative, so playing the same genre probably won't help much after a certain point. But playing different ones can be very helpful, I imagine (same with other mediums).
I mean, they should be. Games are for fun, not for work.
This kind of misdirection is not helpful to the research community, or encouraging politicians to fund effective projects. Everyone WANTS a quick lifestyle change and will latch onto these things, but this is a real biological disease that needs real molecular fixes. Sorry, it's just how it is.
This kind of misdirection is not helpful for educating people on changes they can make now to reduce their risk, rather than waiting for a silver bullet. Alzheimer's research is well-funded in the US as the octogenarians running our congress are personally invested in it.
General Population: in the same dataset, life expectancy averaged 74 years.
The average age at which patients are typically diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease is 79.
People in these jobs don't live long enough on average to get diagnosed, at the same rate. The same effect will happen in any job that lowers your life expectancy.
I'm also a little concerned that the BMJ plot of risk adjusted mortality still shows a clear positive correlation with age at death, which I strongly suspect would turn out to be statistically significant. The adjustment does not appear to be correct, therefore, and while that might still preserve these odd findings, it's definitely not ideal.
The much better occupation, from the graph, is the third outlier -- mining and geological engineers. Life expectancy: 80.3, risk-adjusted mortality: 1.1%. Or, alternatively, economists are close too (80.6; 1.19%).
Aircraft pilots, btw, really were the opposite end of the scale (78.1; 2.3%), surprising enough to be noteworthy beyond a control (the BMJ article does discuss this a little, but seriously -- that's very surprising for a highly-educated profession).
For example, the other day I wanted to figure out what’s the current state about whether gender equality causes measurable benefits for companies… and the studies are terrible. All of them. Most of them was about Norway, and almost all of them had a reference point in 2008, one of the largest economic crisis, and somehow most of them was even worse than this. They openly distorted statistics. Depending on what they wanted to achieve to one way or another. Even the most cited ones. It’s disgusting. The best ones could prove only that inequality is not inherent of economics, but social. But the agenda was different for them too, so they tried to lie something bigger, all the time, while this would be more than enough to support it.
Every top-level thread is like a multiple choice armchair takedown.
Here's an interesting counterpoint. "Unthinkable" presented studies of navigation tasks in 2D/3D and testing/training. Hippocampus measurements correlated with skill and training. Interestingly, this skill and training and measurements all correlated with beneficial responses in a disaster (as in, not panicking). Weird right?
So you have people self selecting out of the profession, self selecting for early death within the profession, and on top of that, a general life expectancy discrepancy that is near impossible to adjust for.
(Unless people highly predisposed to dying in car accidents are also highly predisposed to mudering people who will have, but don’t yet have, Alzheimers. But that seems sufficiently unlikely for the purposes of this hypothetical.)
Jokes aside, the serious answer depends on whether the link is causative or merely collerative.
Not that cab drivers only live to 67 - many would still live to 75, 85, 95, but that occasionally a driver dies at 25 or 35 bringing the mean figure way down.
Delay your aging by using your brain a fuck ton, all the time, learning brand new things nowhere near anything you already know.
I'm not saying you shouldn't try using your brain more but this is just like saying Stephen Hawking should have tried exercising more.
Of those, sleep issues are highly correlated with Alzheimer's and also with auto accidents. Controlling for age alone here would select for low incidence of sleep issues.
So no indication they accounted for the expected lifespan of the profession.
It’s a plausible hypothesis but it’s really really hard to tease things out and controlling for age is the obvious thing but that doesn’t get you the conclusive result you think it does.
then don't post
https://www.bmj.com/content/387/bmj-2024-082194
I don't think many realize how huge the replication crisis is. You have 75% of studies in a leading social psychology journal failing to replicate. [1] Another replication effort on preclinical medical studies found only 11% were able to be replicated, a replication effort on cancer studies found the average effect size to be 85% lower than published, and much more. If you assume most science headlines, at least outside of the traditional hard sciences, are false - you're substantially more likely to be right than wrong.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis#In_psycholo...
'Why ‟controlling for a variable” doesn't (usually) work' - https://dynomight.net/control/
Other things that don't work, including four other 'controlling for a variable' entries at items 39 through 43: https://dynomight.net/things/
Also, older ones were exposed to a ton of cigarette smoke.
Sure they might be better and per unit of time they drive they must have miniscule amount of accidents.
But if there's a 0.001% chance per hour driven, then over enough hours a few accidents are inevitable.
Pedestrians are a lot more at risk. So that's unsurprising that annually 1/2 taxi driver might be fatally injured in one.
But I would assume the ratio of other drivers to taxi drivers would be high enough that this number should be zero as well.
That's actually crazy if that's as low as you dare guess. I would have easily guessed it was like, a fraction of a percent. 1 in 10 would be fucking nuts.
"For each occupation, we first calculated the percentage of deaths due to Alzheimer’s disease and the mean age at death in years (ie, average life expectancy). We plotted the association between these two variables, with each observation reflecting a single occupation. The purpose of this analysis was to illustrate the need to account for the person’s age at death since the risk of Alzheimer’s disease rises with age and therefore Alzheimer’s mortality would naturally be lower in occupations with a lower life expectancy."
not to mention the other devil in these studies: some professions are statistically going to have the lowest rate of every possible disease. you can't just cherrypick outliers and declare "causal!"
Where? What country/ies?
For from the look of it it doesn't look like an exceptionally hard job (btw a brother of mine did years of "VTC": "Vehicule de Tourisme avec Chauffeur", basically high-end taxis without the "taxi" logo).
2. The original study didn't just study taxi drivers, but also ambulance drivers. I doubt that their life expectancy is that much lower.
Define "hard job". Carrying heavy objects?