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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.
Also, older ones were exposed to a ton of cigarette smoke.
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).
https://www.bmj.com/content/387/bmj-2024-082194
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.
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.
> 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.
And the second thing: What about modern taxi drivers that rely almost exclusively on GPS?
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3920458/
Second rule - Got edge case? Got headline!
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_.
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-h...
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).
I mean, they should be. Games are for fun, not for work.
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.
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.