US study shows:

Cab drivers are much less likely to die from Alzheimer’s disease

(Bild: stock.adobe.com/Bumble Dee)

In the USA, cab drivers and professional ambulance drivers are at least half as likely to die from Alzheimer's disease as other people. This was the result of an epidemiological study analyzing data from nine million deceased people.

It is possible that this is the effect of complex tasks for the brain, including a "map memory", according to a scientific paper by Anupam Jena from the Department of Health Policy at Harvard University in Boston in the USA, which was recently published in the British Medical Journal.

The study analyzed 443 professions
For the study, official death notices in the United States between January 1, 2020 and December 31, 2021 were analyzed, which also listed the occupations of the deceased. A total of 443 professions were analyzed in the study.

The experts summarized their findings as follows: "Of the 8,972,221 deceased persons with information on their occupation, 3.88 percent (348,328) were reported to have Alzheimer's disease as the cause of death. Among cab drivers, 1.03 percent (171/16,658) died of this dementia, while the rate among ambulance drivers was 0.74 percent (10/1,348)."

Because cab drivers have a comparatively low life expectancy of 67.8 years in the USA, mainly due to social circumstances, and ambulance drivers only have an average life expectancy of 64.2 years (general population in the USA: 74.3 years), the scientists adjusted their calculations according to the age curves (the incidence of Alzheimer's increases with age; note) to take this factor into account.

The authors of the study: "After adjustment, ambulance drivers (0.91 percent) and cab drivers (1.03 percent) had the lowest proportion of deaths due to Alzheimer's disease of all the occupations studied." In contrast, the average Alzheimer's mortality rate in the population as a whole was 1.69 percent.

Changes in the hippocampus region
The question remains as to the possible reason for this observation, which does not yet constitute causal evidence. Here, however, one could fall back on previous studies. The scientists stated: "A groundbreaking neurological imaging study showed that cab drivers in London experienced increased functional changes in the hippocampus region of the brain. The hippocampus is the brain region involved in both the creation of cognitive spatial maps and the development of Alzheimer's disease."

As dementia develops, the hippocampus of those affected atrophies. "This finding suggests the possibility that occupations that frequently require the processing of spatial information, such as cab driving, may be associated with lower Alzheimer's mortality," the experts wrote.