You’ve arrived — too easily!
Taxi and ambulance drivers have the lowest rates of death from Alzheimer’s disease, according to a fascinating new study that suggests Google Maps may be rotting our brains by not forcing us to flex cognitive muscles.
In total, 1.03% of taxi drivers and 0.91% of ambulance drivers — most of whom worked before GPS navigation systems were widely used — died of the disease compared to 3.9% of everyone else, according to the study, published this month in the medical journal BMJ.
Professional drivers may have a lower risk of developing the disease because they make split-second navigational and spatial decisions constantly on the job, said researchers, who analyzed 400 jobs.
“They’re making decisions literally every few seconds about where to go, where to turn,” Anupam Jena, a professor of health at Harvard Medical School who authored the study, told the Wall Street Journal.
“The way that your brain is used over the course of your career or the course of your life might impact the likelihood that someone develops dementia.”
Drivers who don’t rely on a robot for directions must make problem-solving decisions about how to get from one point to another when road is closed or blocked — potentially protecting their cognitive abilities, the researchers said.
Taxi and ambulance drivers, however, didn’t have a lower risk of developing other types of dementia, which are often vascular diseases, researchers said.
Overall, the study looked at 107, 896 men and women in the US with careers ranging from cleaners to computer specialists.
Other experts said driving a taxi or ambulance may have simply delayed the onset of Alzheimer’s disease.
“It’s probably unlikely that being a taxi driver prevented people from getting Alzheimer’s disease pathology in the brain, but it allowed them to mask some of the symptoms for longer,” said David Wolk, director of the University of Pennsylvania Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center.
Researchers used Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data from death certificates that list occupation and cause of death from 2020 to 2022.
The study doesn’t note when the subjects worked as taxi and ambulance divers, but it states all subjects were free of Alzheimer’s disease between 1986 and 2002.
The research supports previous evidence that education and brain stimulation may help delay symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease.
