Ditch the Sat Navs as taxi drivers who memorised routes 'less likely to get Alzheimer’s'
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Taxi drivers could be less likely to develop Alzheimer’s disease because of how they memorise routes, research suggests. Scientists suspect that regularly driving from memory may boost brain power as a new study shows taxi drivers and ambulance drivers are much less likely to develop the form of dementia as they age. They analysed data on nine million death certificates in the US and looked at 443 different occupations.
After adjusting for age at time of death and other factors, 1.03% of taxi drivers died from Alzheimer's disease while among ambulance drivers, the rate was just 0.74%. This compared to 1.69% for the general population as a whole. Study lead author Dr Vishal Patel, a resident physician at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts, said: "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. We hypothesised 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.".
The study, published in The BMJ, was observational so the researchers cautioned that it cannot confirm a direct link. The scientists are now calling for more research to prove if frequent spatial processing tasks may lower our Alzheimer’s risk. The analysis of US death certificates from 2020 to 2022 did not establish a lower risk of Alzheimer’s in other transport workers, such as bus drivers or aircraft pilots, “possibly due to their reliance on predetermined routes”. It suggests regular drivers may boost their brains in a way which reduces Alzheimer's risk.
