Surprising jobs that protect you from Alzheimer’s… and the jobs that increase your risk of disease
Working two jobs can 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 disease compared to more than 400 different occupations.
This trend did not apply to other transportation jobs that do not require navigation charts, such as pilots or ship captains.
This led the team to believe that the mental exercise of planning a route in your head 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 sense of direction and navigation.
Older studies have shown that taxi and ambulance drivers have a particularly well-developed hippocampus, even as they get older.
Study author Dr. Anupam Jena, a physician at Massachusetts General Hospital, said their results suggest: ‘It is important to consider how occupations may influence the risk of death from Alzheimer’s disease and whether cognitive activities can potentially be preventative.’
About 7 million Americans currently suffer from Alzheimer’s disease, and according to the Alzheimer’s Association, that number is expected to continue to grow to 13 million in the coming decades.
Because ambulance drivers must constantly navigate new routes to the hospital, they exercise 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 profession included in their study. They did not report which occupations had the highest incidence of dementia. But those with the lowest figures included taxi drivers and ambulance drivers
The new results have been 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 during 2020-2022.
Of these deaths, approximately 348,328 were attributed to Alzheimer’s disease.
They looked at disease rates among 443 occupations, including bus drivers, airline pilots, ship captains and teachers.
They also took into account factors like 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 who participated in the study died of Alzheimer’s disease.
Within that period, 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 ambulance drivers.
They did not include information on which jobs have the highest number of dementia diagnoses, nor did they provide specific figures for each job. But according to their graphs, in some jobs, nearly 8 percent of deaths were attributed to Alzheimer’s disease.
Chief executives, one of the few positions for which they have data, were in the middle: About 4 percent of these individuals died of Alzheimer’s disease.
The difference between the outcomes for the road navigators and other transportation professionals led the researchers to look at one part of the brain: the hippocampus.
Older, influential research conducted by University College Londonexamined the brains of taxi drivers after they had passed, and found that this brain region, 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 naturally thin. In Alzheimer’s disease, this happens much more quickly, leading to the memory loss, personality changes and confusion that often accompany the disease.
As people age, they naturally lose some of their brain tissue, which may be linked to some of the age-related changes that some older adults begin to see.
But in Alzheimer’s disease, the tissue disappears en masse, instead of in small, barely noticeable steps, as in normal age.
It could be that taxi and ambulance drivers, by continuously strengthening the connections in this part of the brain, make their brains more resistant to the process of Alzheimer’s.
Dr. However, Jena noted that it is difficult to say whether the results they saw in the study are the result of the work itself. He said their paper should serve as a starting point for further research, rather than “conclusive.”
Other scientists who were not involved in the study also expressed doubt that these results mean that having a certain job can protect you against developing dementia.
Professor Tara Spires-Jones, the president of the British Neuroscience Association, who was not involved in the research, said scientists still cannot conclusively conclude that having certain jobs prevents the development of dementia, and that there may be other factors are. play.
Professor Spires-Jones said: ‘It is possible that people at higher risk of Alzheimer’s disease do not choose memory-intensive driving occupations.’
Professor Robert Howard, professor of geriatric psychiatry at University College London, expressed similar doubts, but offered a different explanation.
He said: ‘It is equally likely that people with better navigation and spatial skills will flourish in these jobs and this represents the presence of greater cognitive reserve so that they require more neurodegeneration before developing symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease.’