Taxi and ambulance drivers less likely to die from Alzheimer’s
Using your brain, and not a GPS, to navigate the world may ward off dementia — although sitting in a car all day probably isn’t great for physical health
The answer they don’t come up with is that drivers crash and kill themselves, thereby not living long enough to get Alz?
Let’s guess:
– A fishing expedition uncorrected for multiple comparisons
– RR of <2
– Confounders ignored (99.9% of taxi and ambulance drivers are under retirement age, exactly when Alzheimer's starts to bite)
– Former taxi and ambulance drivers not investigated
– Inappropriate control groups
– ad nauseam
Are people diagnosed with Alzheimer’s not required to relinquish their driving licence?
Anyhow, less likely than whom? Pre-school children? Doubtful.
So the study was sparked by a study that showed that London black-cab drivers – who are required to learn and pass ‘the knowledge’ – develop different brain structures than others.
And it continue by studying cab drivers in the US – none of whom have to do anything like ‘the knowledge’, as anyone who has hailed a cab at JFK or LAX can attest.
And then, as far as I can determine, the London cabbie study was not ‘before-and-after’ – it did not examine subjects before they started to do ‘the knowledge’, but only after. But ‘the knowledge’ is notorious for having an extremely high drop-out rate, maybe as high as 90%. So maybe the cohort was self-selecting, and the conclusion partly-reversed – it’s not that ‘doing the knowledge’ changes your brain, it’s that those with certain types of pre-existing brain development are more-likely to complete ‘the knowledge’. I believe that London cabbies are often related, so maybe a genetic component?
Both studies seem to suffer from all kinds of possible confounding errors. Suggesting that airline pilots always fly the same routes, for example, just seems laughable as an explanatory assertion.
llater,
llamas
I thought that it was already common knowledge that mental decline was slowed by continuing to exercise your brain. For me playing my piano stretches my mind. I started playing quite late in life, lapsed and then picked it up again when I retired. As a consequence of all this, my sight reading never became quite fluent and requires intense concentration. I can only ever play a piece well once I can play it from memory. I have to keep playing my modest little repertoire just to keep it in my head.
I’m sure I read somewhere that there’s no recorded case of a chess Grandmaster developing Alzheimer’s.
Although Bobby Fischer was completely bonkers.
– I believe that London cabbies are often related . . .
In general that would incline me to believe the qualification is a cover for nepotism and cronyism.
“The answer they don’t come up with is that drivers crash and kill themselves, thereby not living long enough to get Alz?”
Or end up as massive lard arses who die from heart attacks before they can get Alzheimers?
See also lorry drivers……
I’d be inclined to suspect cronyism as well, except that ‘the knowledge’ required to pass the test for a cab licence in London is notoriously-difficult to study for, but is all public information, and the test is conducted by a notionally-independent agency. Plus – there’s no artificial limit on the number of licensed cabbies, as there is in other places – if you can pass the test, you get the licence.
More likely, the families of cab drivers – a trade long-recognized as offering a tremendous opportunity to youngsters without too many other prospects who are nevertheless prepared to apply themselves to get the qualification – are uniquely positioned to help, support and encorage their family members in this very-challenging endeavour.
llater,
llamas
Do you mean that as soon as an Ambulance Driver or a Taxi driver gets Alzheimer’s disease he is likely to crash and kill himself so the death is not *recorded* as due to Alzheimer’s disease but as a “traffic accident”?
They think ambulance drivers and taxis don’t use GPS?
“To investigate further, Maguire and Woollett scanned the brains of novice cab drivers before, during and after their training, and compared the scans with the drivers’ success on the Knowledge. There was no difference in hippocampus size before the training started. But after training, those that passed the test had bigger hippocampi”.
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2011.9602
Llamas @ 6.49. “More likely, the families of cab drivers – a trade long-recognized as offering a tremendous opportunity to youngsters without too many other prospects who are nevertheless prepared to apply themselves to get the qualification – are uniquely positioned to help, support and encorage their family members in this very-challenging endeavour.
Having grown up with a best mate who’s Dad was a cabbie, we both knew what it was all about – the shitty hours, a lot of time sitting on your own and driving miles (his Dad was a ‘night man’ – less traffic). Plus the chance of getting bilked.
There was a lot of good stuff too – working when you wanted, no one looking over your shoulder, and his Dad always said he paid more to his accountant than he paid to the tax man. I never fancied it, but my mate did and made a pretty decent living till the covid response screwed it all up.
ISTR reading somewhere that one study had indicated that the changes to the brain made by learning “the knowledge” were identical to those made by learning a second language to a high degree of proficiency. It was observable in an MRI.
@Addollf – well, I stand corrected. Thanks for digging out the actual study. Interesting that none of the mainstream media reporting covered this detail accurately.
When I lived in London, I knew two black cabbies, an older man with a family and a younger, single guy. Both of them were (to put it kindly) not over-endowed in the intellectual sphere, but both had some of the finest street-smarts I ever saw. So I wonder whether the brain development seen in cabbies fosters those capacities, or whether it was just accumulated experience of seeing a zillion different individuals and situations.
llater,
llamas