Earlier quoted context omitted.
death certificate?
Just keeping you on your toes?
Assigned-cabbie-at-birth...
Alzheimer's disease mortality among taxi and ambulance drivers (2024)
141–146 of 146 posts
Re: Alzheimer's disease mortality among taxi and ambulance drivers (2024)
#142The biggest weakness in the study is that Taxi and ambulance drivers in the dataset died around 64 to 67, versus 74 for other occupations [0]. If Alzheimer's is much more likely to show up later, then lower Alzheimer's related death rates among Taxi and ambulance drivers may reflect earlier mortality rather than any effect from the job. [0] https://www.sciencemediacentre.org/expert-reaction-to-study-...
If you read it, one of the first things they discuss is methodology for adjusting for age at death as it relates to Alzheimer's mortality, citing exactly this objection. I'm not a statistician and I don't know if their methodology is solid or not, but it's been addressed.
NB: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47390621>
Re: Alzheimer's disease mortality among taxi and ambulance drivers (2024)
#143The 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…
Hah. My father has similar stories from his time as a paramedic. There were some transitions from one page to another that were considered unusually difficult, and during training they would find a way to force the rookie map-book reader to handle these transitions. Bonus points if they could handle the situation when the route continually straddled a page boundary!
They also, of course, knew which streets had been re-marked as one way and such since the map book was published, so they got the rookie into tricky positions where the world conflicted with the map, forcing them to spend only part of the time with their nose in the book.
Re: Alzheimer's disease mortality among taxi and ambulance drivers (2024)
#144> 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 di…
they spend almost a whole page addressing this.
... Alzheimer’s disease symptoms typically develop after patients’ working years, with only 5-10% of cases occurring in people younger than 65 years (early onset).11 14 While subtle symptoms could develop earlier, they would still most likely be after a person had worked long enough to deem the occupation to be a so-called usual occupation ...
Re: Alzheimer's disease mortality among taxi and ambulance drivers (2024)
#145> 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 di…
they spend almost a whole page addressing this. ... Alzheimer’s disease symptoms typically develop after patients’ working years, with only 5-10% of cases occurring in people younger than 65 years (early onset).11 14 While subtle symptoms could develop earlier, they would still most likely be after a person had worked long enough to deem the occupation to be a so-called usual occupation ...
Yes I saw someone say as much in other comments. My suspicion that transfers were not accounted for because the employment was a snapshot in time between 2 years was definitely wrong.
"What the funeral director deemed/was instructed to record as 'career'" is still somewhat limited, but is plausibly good.
Re: Alzheimer's disease mortality among taxi and ambulance drivers (2024)
#146Pointing again to the idea that this disease is triggered by bacteria, at least in some cases [1].
By bacteria or another microorganism that is alive (not a virus). There is a growing suspicion that oral bacteria is related with Alzheimer somehow.
Taxi and ambulance drivers have one thing in common with all the other drivers: they live behind an habitacle filter most of the time. But they have also one particular thing in common that truck drivers and car owners don't have.
They disinfect the car with alcohol after each customer.
[1] This does not mean that other causes like chemicals or pollutants known to damage the nervous system couldn't trigger it also.