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Alzheimer's disease mortality among taxi and ambulance drivers (2024)

bmj.com

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Re: Alzheimer's disease mortality among taxi and ambulance drivers (2024)

#111

Post by vajrabum »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #97

If we've got data for 400 occupations, and studying the two obvious outliers (as shown in Fig 1), isn't this p-hacking? Not saying malice is involved, but with so many occupations, the statistical aberration would be not to find outliers that spuriously pass statistical significance testing.

p is not p-hacking. p-hacking is when instead of making a hypothesis and then looking for a correlation instead you look at the data and see if there are any correlations to be found. The problem with the second is if there are lots of possibilities it's much more likely that you will find a spurious correlation. That happens because the sample distribution is not the population distribution. And in fact in complicated data sets it's more likely that if you look at everything that you'll find spurious correlations than not. In social sciences these days people often register their hypothesis before running the study to prevent p-hacking and reduce the possibility of spurious correlation.

Re: Alzheimer's disease mortality among taxi and ambulance drivers (2024)

#112

Post by bloomingeek »

qwertytyyuu wrote: post #66

I cannot navigate for to save my life, if this ends up be causal i'm so screwed

If I may suggest, my wife and I are advanced in age. When we were young, like everyone else, we used maps and the travel atlases as we roamed around the US. I was a semi-expert at maps because of my Dad's guidance as a kid. My wife, on the other hand, didn't know east from west.

So, before every trip, the night before we left we would study a map, always stressing the direction of north and monitoring the sun's position. To her joy she became an excellent co-pilot, soon surpassing my map skills! Now, of course, there's GPS, which we both love, but agree isn't as much fun as maps. (We still carry an atlas in the car for a backup.)

Re: Alzheimer's disease mortality among taxi and ambulance drivers (2024)

#113

Post by bhouston »

matsemann wrote: post #56
rudhdb773b wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think your 2nd point is less likely. Anecdotal, but I've spoken with many taxi and ride-share drivers, and my impression is that their decision to seek out and continue that line of work is almost always driven by outside economic considerations. I've never heard someone base their decision on their ability to perform the job.

There's a big difference with being a driver now, though, compared to having had it as a career and being part of this study. They did it before gps.

100%.

Re: Alzheimer's disease mortality among taxi and ambulance drivers (2024)

#115

Post by rzmmm »

SOLAR_FIELDS wrote: post #109
fn-mote wrote: post #2

The 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?

This kind of replication would make the findings much more convincing.

Re: Alzheimer's disease mortality among taxi and ambulance drivers (2024)

#116

Post by dundarious »

> Setting: Use of death certificates from the National Vital Statistics System in the United States, which were linked to occupation, 1 January 2020-31 December 2022.

Doesn't this mean that if you get Alzheimer's and as such are unable to work, that it is quite unlikely you would show up as a taxi/ambulance driver in this study?

Such studies need to account for transfers between groups, but rarely seem to do so (I did not read the complete paper, please correct me as necessary).

Re: Alzheimer's disease mortality among taxi and ambulance drivers (2024)

#117

Post by Shorel »

praptak wrote: post #49
randycupertino wrote: post #32

Earlier 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.

The Knowledge is exactly the first thing to get into my mind the moment I read the headline.

Re: Alzheimer's disease mortality among taxi and ambulance drivers (2024)

#118

Post by Shorel »

rossant wrote: post #96
randycupertino wrote: post #32

Earlier 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.

And they are called maps. Wonderful stuff.

Re: Alzheimer's disease mortality among taxi and ambulance drivers (2024)

#119

Post by MisterTea »

randycupertino wrote: post #32
fn-mote wrote: post #2

The 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 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…

> Map books were no fun but some of the dudes I worked with definitely became route-finding savants.

Similar. I worked doing deliveries for an event company all over the greater NY area, based out of Queens. I usually rode jump-seat and spent a few years with a retired trucker who was such a savant. He could maneuver a truck through any tight/precarious situation with great precision and care. He could visit a location once and recall it next year, every year.

The most impressive was a full day gauntlet starting at 5 AM where he navigated starting in south queens NYC to a stop in Staten Island, then off to Jersey city, then up to Sleepy Hollow NY, then all the way to some Greek church deep in Suffolk county through the winding maze that is the north shore - no map, no gps.

The most scary situation was driving a smaller Isuzu cab-over box truck through Brooklyn on a hot summer day. We had no AC, windows down, headed along a narrow avenue under the elevated train tracks. A passing truck was a little too far - BOOM- a loud shattering glass and bang sound. Turns out that idiot hit his mirror violently into ours so hard it showered him directly in the face with shards of mirror. I only got hit with a few pieces in the arm and a bunch landed on my lap. He didn't flinch. He kept the truck strait while muttering "I've been waiting for that to happen again." He thankfully only had two small cuts on his face, nothing went into his eyes. We lucky passed an auto parts store and he was able to rig up something on the mirror bar, continued on and finished the route.

He was a real character and he always had a lot of fun and crazy road stories. That dude also taught me to drive a truck with air brakes which is also how I learned to drive a manual. In addition to showing me all the secret traffic avoidance and toll beating routes, he was a foodie and showed me a lot of interesting restaurants he'd stop at along our routes. He took me to the famous Wo Hop in Manhttan's China Town when you could just walk in and get a table (late 90's.) He parked the truck at an inactive construction site a block away and moved cones around it so we didn't get a ticket. That character knew all the tricks :-)

Re: Alzheimer's disease mortality among taxi and ambulance drivers (2024)

#120

Post by Mordisquitos »

jgilias wrote: post #80
stef25 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, basically Waze is causing dementia

Not sure about Waze, but the combination of AI + TikTok/shorts/etc sounds like “not great” for long term brain health.

Indeed. My comment about Google Maps (and Waze, etc.) exacerbating Alzheimer's was mostly in jest and an exaggeration, but I'm absolutely certain that there is a statistically significant proportion of society whose current overuse of "AI" chatbots and short video consumption will result in cognitive deterioration if it continues at their current rate.

To be clear, I'm not implying that usage of LLMs or viewing potentially unlimited video shorts is necessarily bad, nor could I guess the threshold from which doing these things becomes cognitively damaging in the long term. All I'm saying is that such a threshold exists and some people in society are surpassing it.

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