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Taxi drivers rarely die of Alzheimer's
- amelius 2mo agoSomething with more data: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3920458/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3920458/
- arielweisberg 2mo agoCan video games provide similar benefits?
- jader201 2mo agoI’m sure Crazy Taxi provides the same benefits! :)
- moduspol 2mo agoIf you can survive the high blood pressure!
- bloomca 2mo agoThe thing about taxi drivers is that they have something at stake, while video games have no fail state effectively. You can be punished in-game, but overall it does not matter. 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).
- wavemode 2mo agoYeah but, Taxi drivers usually don't hop around from place to place. They work in a specific metro area.
- bloomca 2mo agoI assume there is enough variation to be aware of -- seasons change, constructions, car crashes, so you need to alter the route a bit. Today you have the maps with navigation, but I assume you still need to be quite aware on where to park, where is the best entrance to some places, etc. So you basically need to keep some fresh info on top of your mind.
- dragontamer 2mo agoMaybe when played at a high level. But too many games are too casual without much mental effort. I mean, they should be. Games are for fun, not for work.
- jerlam 2mo agoMost modern open-world games have waypoint indicators and on-screen minimaps, if not teleportation, because memorizing and navigating and traversing through the video game map is not particularly fun.
- Marsymars 2mo agoSome years ago I participated in a study where I lied down in an MRI machine and had to navigate in a video game maze. (Custom Half-Life 2 level, IIRC.) 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.
- chuckadams 2mo agoThe ones that do stopped being taxi drivers.
- cjbgkagh 2mo agoI would assume that the task of being a taxi driver would act as a near constant test for Alzheimer’s, would be interesting to do GWAS studies on older taxi drivers and compare against taxi drivers who quit earlier in their careers.
- don_esteban 2mo agoYeah, that was the first thing that comes to mind. And the second thing: What about modern taxi drivers that rely almost exclusively on GPS?
- cobertos 2mo agoTrue, though the article does also mention another study not based on taxi drivers, but just living in high spatial complexity ZIP codes puts you at a lower risk. > 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.
- Havoc 2mo agoSeems strange to me that a specific type of thinking could influence something where most causes being investigated are physical
- toomuchtodo 2mo agoPerhaps specific types of thinking cause somewhat sustained brain activity during waking hours that mitigates adverse physical changes leading to Alzheimer’s. 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-how-brain-washes-itself-during-sleep https://www.science.org/content/article/scientists-uncover-h...
- jkahrs595 2mo agoNot strange when you realize thinking is also physical.
- teeray 2mo agoUnless the arrow of causality is the other way: those that would tend to develop memory problems do not become or remain as Taxi drivers.
- jvanderbot 2mo agoRight, so we're speedrunning the studies here. Best to just stopover on TFA and see what they found. 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_.
- cesarvarela 2mo agoWouldn’t thinking be like exercise for the mind? And we know what happens to people that don’t exercise
- tokai 2mo agoTaxi driver also live shorter lives than average, which would fit with lower levels of alzheimers. But interesting link nonetheless.
- kelnos 2mo agoAge and life expectancy was controlled for in the study.
- walthamstow 2mo ago> In one landmark 2000 study, neuroscientists compared the brains of licensed London taxi drivers with those of people who did not drive cabs. 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.
- artisinal 2mo agoIndeed. Elsewhere in the world taxi drivers just follow the GPS.
- SoftTalker 2mo agoWe had taxis long before GPS. 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.
- pryelluw 2mo agoSame. First thing they had me buy was a map book with all the local neighborhoods. The map on the wall helped get shortcuts from others. This is where I learned the difference between the different kinds of shortcuts. Some saved time, others distance, and some even potholes. It was a fun time.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- OptionOfT 2mo agoMy 2019 car had the cardinal directions in the mirror (N, NE, E, ES, S etc). My 2025 does not anymore. I hate it. I think it helps to get that baseline of orientation, and then you look at the street numbers, and it all starts to come together.
- al_borland 2mo agoMy grandfather was a taxi driver and delivery driver for many years. He made it to 93 and I don't recall him dealing with any cognitive decline. He used to tell me different routes to get to a stadium that was closed before I was even born.
- bpodgursky 2mo agoGuys... Alzheimer's is 60-80% heritable, and driven largely by APOE genotype. No, you cannot get out of it with One Quick Trick. We have to find therapeutics to make real progress here. 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.
- jmcgough 2mo agoHalf of people with Alzheimer's carry at least one APOE ε4 allele. However, a full quarter of the population carries that mutation, and most carriers never go on to develop Alzheimer's. Lifestyle matters a lot here. 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.
- bpodgursky 2mo agoTo the extent that lifestyle helps, which is not zero, you need to exercise. "Become a cabbie" is NOT an intervention that is going to help whatsoever.
- yfontana 2mo ago> "Become a cabbie" is NOT an intervention that is going to help whatsoever. How about promoting spatial awareness and reasoning exercises (which is the actual suggestion of the article)?
- detourdog 2mo agoMy understanding is that there are forms of dementia more tied to genetics than "Alzheimer's". One that has links to genetics is Frontal temporal Dementia.
- kelnos 2mo ago
- cortic 2mo agoTaxi Drivers: The mean age at death is approximately 67.8 years. 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.
- TacticalCoder 2mo agoThat's very interesting but why do taxi drivers have a job that lowers life expectancy? Is it because they're sitting too much? Or because they're inhaling CO from cars too much? Or staying inside (the car) too much? Or is it just stressful? 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).
- wilburx3 2mo agoGetting stabbed in the neck by filthy street urchins.
- smt88 2mo agoProbably not smart to post something like this on the same message board you’re using to get a job
- bezmi 2mo agoA joke?
- Dusseldorf 2mo agomight turn out that the next company they apply to is run by street urchins who don't take too kindly to the stereotype? or possibly humorless scolds who don't want their employees telling jokes in their free time?
- YmiYugy 2mo agoI find the title highly misleading. The actual claim is a 40% lower chance (1 in 100 as opposed to 1 in 60) for taxi and ambulance drivers when compared to the average. That’s a big drop but the title implies that Alzheimer’s is rare in taxi drivers specifically and I don’t think the difference warrants that claim whatsoever.
- jere 2mo agoYea "rarely" is pretty misleading. It makes it seem like it almost never happens when it's just a slightly lower chance (if that's even true).
- fitsumbelay 2mo agoFirst rule of attentioneering - If it bleeds, it ledes Second rule - Got edge case? Got headline!
- OutOfHere 2mo agoEating eggs actually lowers the risk of Alzheimers.
- yfontana 2mo agoSomething interesting that the original study looked at, but isn't mentioned in the linked article: this effect was not observed for non-Alzheimer's dementia deaths. There seems to be something specific to spatial reasoning and Alzheimer's.
- pama 2mo agoAlzheimers has a very long development stage compared to almost all other dementia (Lewis body also has a long timeline, but none of the other forms has anywhere close to the known length for Alzheimer’s disease). The original study article has no causal analysis, so a simple explanation is that super early Alzheimers symptoms (possibly even undetectable ones outside the context of intense taxi driving) drives people to abandon their taxi- or ambulance-driving jobs and seek other forms of employment.
- lambdaone 2mo agoI wonder if the same is also true of other high-spatial-complexity activities like rock climbing and professional dancing? (Exercise level would of course be a counfounding varable to be eliminated in these cases.)
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- estetlinus 2mo ago> London cabbies must memorize more than 25,000 streets within a 6-mile radius of Charing Cross, a challenge known as “The Knowledge” that takes three to four years. 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.
- philwelch 2mo agoIt seems common for taxi drivers to form a government-sanctioned cartel in order to limit the amount of competition. In the US this traditionally took the form of local taxi medallion systems, where there was a hard quota on how many taxis could be in the city. London's barrier to entry, unlike ours, at least guarantees a level of competence, even if it's excessive. 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.
- petercooper 2mo agoNo, it’s a licensed black cab thing. London has had mini cabs as well for many decades who didn’t need to study anything and were not even licensed till about 20 years ago. However, their downside is they have to be prebooked and can not be hailed on the street. Apps count as booking and not hailing I guess.
- thi2 2mo agoIn germany you had to do an exam to prove your local knowledge before driving a taxi, this did not apply to uber which pissed the taxi drivers off. They got rid of the exam in 2021, now you only need an navigation device in the vehicle.
- wyzer 2mo agobefore or after massive use of navigation apps?
- Melatonic 2mo agoOne of the first things to go with Alzheimer's is spacial mapping in the brain so this makes sense. Your exercising daily a part of the brain that is involved. 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 ?
- pmxi 2mo agoThis test would be passed by a Waymo with ChatGPT.
- Heliodex 2mo ago> Risk adjusted percentages and mortality odds ratios were adjusted for age at death, sex, race, ethnic group, and educational attainment using logistic regression. 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?
- jaypatelani 2mo agoAny studies on chess player and Alzheimer's?
- markhall 2mo agoI love HN for articles like these.... hard to find intellectually interesting yet seemingly corner-case statistics like this elsewhere.
- intellix 2mo agoI wonder how it will look when we start doing statistics on gamers, if AI doesn't destroy our brains first. Then it would be interesting to plot the different death by genre like for example strategy, FPS, puzzle, etc. Someone else asked about Chess players which is probably also related right. 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.
- marcd35 2mo agoThat’s an interesting point and we have not really had a reliable dataset to qualify individuals as “professional gamer/streamer” vs a hobbyist. Their content publication history should be a good metric for establishing our future subjects and departed ones as engaging in above average gameplay for each specific genre. I’ve always found it fascinating that I could recall essentially turn by turn navigation of WoW classic routes in which I spent countless hours. I’ve always thought about trying the memory palace technique and using those routes which would probably work well.
- akamaka 2mo agoI wonder if alcohol consumption plays a role here, since it is a known risk factor for Alzheimer’s. A taxi driver who works 60 hours a week will have very little time left over for drinking, whereas pilots have relatively short work hours where they actually need to be sober.
- jere 2mo ago> A taxi driver who works 60 hours a week will have very little time left over for drinking That's plenty of time to be a full blown alcoholic.
- lazyasciiart 2mo agoNot to mention that your full time alcoholic isn’t taking 12 hour shifts off to be sober.
- akamaka 2mo agoYou don’t need to be a full blown acoholic to be affected, it’s simply a correlation of more alcohol consumption to faster decline of the brain. Having a job that requires you to be sober more hours of the week might bump you into a lower risk category.
- samso26 2mo ago[flagged]
- anonymousiam 2mo agoCould it be that the cause/effect relationship here is incorrect? Perhaps only people with the cognitive skills for complex mental maps and spatial reasoning can be effective at driving a cab, so driving a cab may not "protect" you from Alzheimer's at all, but people who have the skills to keep a job as a cab driver have a brain that is less susceptible to Alzheimer's.
- swrrt 2mo agoTaxi drivers in old days needs to remember the whole map of their city, I think that is an efficient exercising/training that recommended for anti-Alzheimer, just like playing puzzles or quiz for oldman? But nowadays it is all about google map, not so sure about the effectiveness.
- panabee 2mo agoThe overall dataset was very large (8,972,221 deaths), but only 1,348 ambulance drivers were included, and just 10 had Alzheimer’s disease as the underlying cause of death. 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.
- Perenti 2mo agoHow many elderly Taxi drivers die of traffic accident? Perhaps the job is culling the Alzheimer's sufferers before other symptoms and signs arise?
- swang 2mo agoWasn't there some an article/video from somewhere where a man had worked in a hot environment (I think it was on a navy ship in the engine room) and even though his family had a history of Alzheimer's, he never showed any signs of it. Does anyone know what I'm talking about? (Might not be Alzheimer, might be thinking of another disease)
- msuvakov 2mo agoWhen the original paper came out a few months ago, I vibe coded a quick reconstruction of the main results. Page has the interactive charts: https://suvakov.github.io/vibes/AlzheimerMortalityByOccupation/ https://suvakov.github.io/vibes/AlzheimerMortalityByOccupati...
- pier25 2mo agoDoes gaming also use similar spatial skills?
- sixo 2mo agoI have a feeling gaming is quite harmful for spatial skills in the long run, because you learn many different maps (often transient ones in rng-ed games), rather than one fixed one. I would not be surprised if an epidemic of early mental decline begins to show in gamers in coming decades. I'm 36 now and feel like my spatial reasoning is declining in a strange severe way.
- kombookcha 2mo agoI wonder if it's actually anything to do with mentally mapping digital areas per se, or if it's more to do with the fact that you're not engaging your senses in the same way as when you're moving around a physical space. If I go to a new place, say a gas station, there's a specific route I took to get there. There's smells and sounds and sights that will be specific to that time and place. I feel like that will generate a memory that's much grittier for the brain to hold on to, than one where I've digitally moved through a place. When I jump around a Quake map, I know where I'm going, but there's no wind in my face and I'm actually sat in a chair. Sure there's sounds and sights in digital spaces, but they don't smell like anything and you're not actually touching anything but your mouse and keyboard. And the sights and sounds are less textured than real life - repeating assets, limited number of sounds etc. You're not gonna be surprised by a new birdcall, or a sudden burst of smell when the gas station guy opens the grill. Knowing how important smell alone is to memory, I wonder if what's actually happening is that you're mentally engaged in a pretty narrow way when gaming, and that that's not really the best way for a brain to operate for long stretches of your life.
- sixo 2mo agoI think this is definitely part of the problem. The senses are designed to all be involved in navigating a single, mostly-permanent world. Proprioception is supposed to orient within this permanent space. Whereas my proprioception has "nothing to do" in video games, and all my senses are only experiencing the world outside the game, which I am giving none of my attention.
- czhu12 2mo agoI had to read this a few times to make sure I read it right > 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
- fhe 2mo agomight want to look into statistics on ppl who play a lot of first-person shooting games. does it have to navigation of physical environments? or virtuals ones work too?
- thi2 2mo agoI wonder if the usage of mobile navigation will increase Alzheimers for our generations. When driving I either now the way or use maps, there is rarely any guesswork or active thinking involved, maybe running is helping but even there I sometimes run routes navigated by watch.
- 3stacks 2mo agoPurely anecdotal, but I experimented with getting rid of my phone entirely for 6 months (using VoIP on my laptop for calls and text), which meant I had to plan my route ahead of time using online maps (OsmAnd). I found that my short-term memory improved noticeably and I could easily recall 10 digit numbers I just saw briefly.
- emil-lp 2mo agoRelated: Alzheimer's disease mortality among taxi and ambulance drivers (2024) 229 points, 4 months ago, 137 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47559481 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47559481 --- Taxi drivers offer a clue to Alzheimer's risk 127 points, Dec 2024, 109 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42502899 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42502899 --- Alzheimer's Mortality Lowest for Taxi, Ambulance Drivers 12 points, Dec 2024, 9 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42450455 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42450455
- contubernio 2mo agoThis is a case where the claim is clearly nonsense, and the interesting question is where is the error.
- rankut 2mo agoThen this should stand true for gamers who play a lot of open world games too...
- Cthulhu_ 2mo agoI'm not convinced, as every open world game after Morrowind has had a marker or route mapped out for them in the HUD. I wouldn't know how to get from A to B in most games without it. I get that it's opt-in in most cases but still. That said, the effects of video games on brain aging will become apparent in the coming decades.
- rankut 2mo agoAgreed, Open world are quite new but GenZ or GenX should show the effects.
- kgwgk 2mo ago> rarely > roughly 1 in 100 compared with 1 in 60 I guess the broad population also rarely dies of Alzheimer’s?
- FrustratedMonky 2mo agoIF the key is spatial navigation processing. Would bicycling be included? When in my car, I'm just dumbly following the map app. But on a bike, I'm still having to keep track of where I'm going and a route.
- summarybot 2mo agoBallet and Tennis are the main counters to pesky-brain-plaque. Constantly flexing your internal navigation system sounds like it achieves the same thing by the sounds of this headline. [I did not read the article]
- gdevenyi 2mo agoPeople who are likely to get Alzheimer's don't get jobs as taxi drivers.
- Noaidi 2mo agoI think this actually suffers from selection bias. To be a taxi driver in London is not just simply applying for for the job and trying it out. You have to pass a very difficult memory test to be a taxi driver in London. So the study might be testing out people who have extremely good memories to begin with and might be less likely to suffer from Alzheimer’s genetically. So I’m wondering if this would still be true if it was tested on taxi drivers in New York City. But my other theory, if this is not true, is that because they are now seeing Alzheimer’s as being a problem of glucose transport , and Since using your memory uses energy in the brain, this would lower overall glucose in the brain and protect it from developing all Alzheimer’s. Or maybe like I said before that these people who can pass these taxi driver test already have excellent glucose transport in the brain which enables them to memorize the streets of London so much easier.
- larodi 2mo agoAccidentally stumbled on an ESRI's GIS for Scienece volume... there was a cited evidence of MRI scans of high-scholers brains, monitored while kids develop spatial reasoning skills. Well the images definitely showed prefrontal cortex better developed, only after an year. So this is more than anecdotal evidence.
- dzonga 2mo agoI think in the future more cases of Alzheimer's are gonna be present e.g with the potent use of marijuana that's present these days, excess drinking & lack of reading + dumbing down of population via use of llms.
- nkg 2mo agoThe dumbing down has started way before llms, way before social media. I never thought I would miss the TV and magazines era.
- tsoukase 2mo agoA primitive risk factor of Dementia is the lower cognitive effect lately due to any modern cause: drugs, mobile phones/LLMs, stress of war or climate crisis, job burn out. Even the reverse Flynn effect measured at early adulthood predisposes to earlier dementia diagnosis.
- WorseIsBetter 2mo ago[dead]
- vitiral 2mo ago> These findings stopped me in my tracks because those two jobs rely on the same thing as my own work: maps. Those jobs rely on navigation, not maps. Reading maps and navigating the real world are very, very different things. The later point about zip codes with higher complexity is the same - these residents have to _navigate_ in more complex situations. How the author seems to be conflating that their personal job of staring at maps therefore protects them from Alheimers is very wishful thinking IMO. Based on this data, I wouldn't be surprised if Google Maps has lead to a rise of Alzheimers.
- segmondy 2mo agoolder taxi drivers from the past I guess, these days the modern taxi drivers are almost all GPS reliant.
- lencastre 2mo agonow show me the bullet hole ridden B-52 pic