Two jobs could protect you from developing dementia, according to a study.
Researchers found that taxi drivers and ambulance drivers have a much lower risk of dying from Alzheimer’s compared to more than 400 different occupations.
This trend did not hold in other transportation jobs that do not require navigation maps, such as ship pilots or captains.
This led the team to believe that the mental exercise of mentally planning a route is particularly important in reducing the risk of Alzheimer’s.
Their theory is that the hippocampus, the part of the brain crucial for memory, is the same part responsible for the sense of direction and navigation.
In older studies, taxi and ambulance drivers have been shown to have a particularly well-developed hippocampus, even as they age.
Study author Dr. Anupam Jena, a physician at Massachusetts General Hospital, said their results suggest: “It is important to consider how occupations may affect the risk of death from Alzheimer’s disease and whether any cognitive activity may be potentially preventive.” “.
About 7 million Americans currently live with Alzheimer’s disease, and according to the Alzheimer’s Association, that number is expected to continue growing in the coming decades to 13 million.
Because ambulance drivers constantly have to navigate new routes to the hospital, they are 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 your study. They did not report which occupations had the highest incidence of dementia. But among those with the lowest level were taxi drivers and ambulance drivers.
The new results were published in the British Medical Journal.
The team collected data from the National Vital Statistics System on more than 8.9 million people who died between 2020 and 2022.
Of those deaths, about 348,328 were attributed to Alzheimer’s.
They examined rates of the disease among 443 occupations, including bus drivers, airplane pilots, ship captains and teachers.
They also took into account factors such as age, gender, race, ethnicity, and education level, and controlled for those demographics when analyzing the data.
They found that, on average, 3.88 percent of people included in the study died from Alzheimer’s.
Within that group, Alzheimer’s killed about 2.7 percent of ship captains and 4.5 percent of pilots, 1 percent of taxi drivers and 0.7 percent of bus drivers. ambulances.
They did not include information about which jobs have the most dementia diagnoses, nor did they give specific numbers for each job. But according to their charts, in some papers, nearly 8 percent of deaths were attributed to Alzheimer’s disease.
CEOs, one of the few roles for which they did include data, fell in the middle: About 4 percent of these individuals died of Alzheimer’s.
The difference between highway navigators’ results and those of other transportation industry professionals led researchers to look toward a region of the brain: the hippocampus.
Older and more influential research by University College LondonThey examined the brains of taxi drivers after their passage and found that this region of the brain, responsible for spatial reasoning and memory, was particularly robust in taxi drivers compared to other professions.
As people age, the amount of healthy tissue in the brain begins to thin naturally. In Alzheimer’s disease, this occurs at a much faster rate, causing memory loss, personality changes, and confusion often associated with the disease.
As people age, they naturally lose some brain tissue volume, which may be associated with some of the age-related changes that some older people begin to see.
But in Alzheimer’s disease, the tissue disappears en masse, rather than in small, barely noticeable increments, as in normal age.
It could be that by constantly strengthening the connections in this part of the brain, taxi and ambulance drivers are making their brains more resistant to the Alzheimer’s process.
However, Dr. Jena noted, it’s hard to say whether the results they saw in the study are a result of the work itself. He said his paper should act as a starting point for future research, not “conclusive.”
Likewise, other scientists who were not involved in the study expressed doubt that these results mean that having a certain job can protect you from getting dementia.
Professor Tara Spiers-Jones, president of the British Neuroscience Association, who was not involved in the research, said scientists cannot yet conclude with certainty that having certain jobs stops the development of dementia, and that there may be other factors at play. play.
Professor Spiers-Jones said: “People at higher risk of Alzheimer’s may not choose driving occupations that require a lot of memory.”
Professor Robert Howard, Professor of Old Age Psychiatry at University College London, expressed similar doubts, but offered a different explanation.
He said: “Individuals with better navigation and spatial skills are equally likely to thrive in these jobs and this represents the presence of greater cognitive reserve, so they need more neurodegeneration before developing symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease.”