So let's say there's a causative link (see other comments here for why this may not be the case), it would take a lifetime of daily complex spatial navigation for several hours every day to significantly reduce Alzheimer's disease risk, and it's still not guaranteed. If there's a linear dose response (a big if) it would still require hours per week for decades for a more modest impact. That seems unattainable for any…
Alzheimer's disease mortality among taxi and ambulance drivers (2024)
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Re: Alzheimer's disease mortality among taxi and ambulance drivers (2024)
#102>Blood test predicts start of Alzheimer’s disease symptoms
https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/blood-t...
Re: Alzheimer's disease mortality among taxi and ambulance drivers (2024)
#103[dead]
Re: Alzheimer's disease mortality among taxi and ambulance drivers (2024)
#104What about other driving occupations?
- fire, police, postal, long haul trucks
Re: Alzheimer's disease mortality among taxi and ambulance drivers (2024)
#105So why not bus drivers? Supposedly because their routes are fixed?
Friend of mine is an airline pilot and when she was doing short flights, going around several EU capitals per day she said "it's like driving a bus". You fly from A -> B -> C -> D -> A. And start over again the next day. She wasn't a huge fan.
>They booked a flight — and got a bus
Re: Alzheimer's disease mortality among taxi and ambulance drivers (2024)
#106>What It Takes to Pass “the Knowledge,” the “Insanely Hard” Exam to Become a London Taxicab Driver
https://www.openculture.com/2024/08/what-it-takes-to-pass-th...
>Learn the Knowledge of London
https://tfl.gov.uk/info-for/taxis-and-private-hire/licensing...
>The Knowledge, London’s Legendary Taxi-Driver Test, Puts Up a Fight in the Age of GPS (2014) — "Its rigors have been likened to those required to earn a degree in law or medicine"
Re: Alzheimer's disease mortality among taxi and ambulance drivers (2024)
#107The rate of fatality for Alzheimer’s among ambulance and taxi drivers is 3x lower than the general population. This is not observed in other transportation-related careers. The connection is believed to be the spatial reasoning involved in routing. No causative link is suggested.
Both are also very social occupations, talking with multiple strangers every day.
Re: Alzheimer's disease mortality among taxi and ambulance drivers (2024)
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The connection is believed to be the spatial reasoning involved in routing. This is triggering me lol. I was a Paramedic for 10 years and 3 of those years were before GPS existed and we had these awful 900 page 5" thick things we had to wield on the fly called Map Books. It was part of our probation period testing and they would time us to pick out the routes reliably within a certain deadline or not graduate from…
Amazing. Paper-based GPS before actual GPS was a thing.
Wait till you see the Honda Electro Gyrocator:
Re: Alzheimer's disease mortality among taxi and ambulance drivers (2024)
#109The rate of fatality for Alzheimer’s among ambulance and taxi drivers is 3x lower than the general population. This is not observed in other transportation-related careers. The connection is believed to be the spatial reasoning involved in routing. No causative link is suggested.
The main question that comes up when I see a study like this is if they were able to take the same hypothesis and replicate it on another dataset in a different locale. For instance, presumably you could run the same study on UK data. Would we see the same results?
Re: Alzheimer's disease mortality among taxi and ambulance drivers (2024)
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The connection is believed to be the spatial reasoning involved in routing. This is triggering me lol. I was a Paramedic for 10 years and 3 of those years were before GPS existed and we had these awful 900 page 5" thick things we had to wield on the fly called Map Books. It was part of our probation period testing and they would time us to pick out the routes reliably within a certain deadline or not graduate from…
In a similar vein, to drive a black taxi in London you have to pass The Knowledge of London exam which requires becoming a human routing database for over twenty thousand streets and landmarks.
I know this from the "Up" series [1] from the late Michael Apted.
Tony got his "knowledge" around "21-Up" in the series, became a London cabby by "28-Up" [2].