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Taxi drivers rarely die of Alzheimer's

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Re: Taxi drivers rarely die of Alzheimer's

#171

Post by AngryData »

TacticalCoder wrote: post #34
cortic wrote: post #30

Taxi Drivers: The mean age at death is approximately 67.8 years. 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.

That's very interesting but why do taxi drivers have a job that lowers life expectancy? Is it because they're sitting too much? Or because they're inhaling CO from cars too much? Or staying inside (the car) too much? Or is it just stressful? 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…

Lower income, little physical mobility in their job, constantly breathing traffic fumes, and tire and brake dust would be my first suspects.

Re: Taxi drivers rarely die of Alzheimer's

#173

Post by sixo »

pier25 wrote: post #172

Does gaming also use similar spatial skills?

I have a feeling gaming is quite harmful for spatial skills in the long run, because you learn many different maps (often transient ones in rng-ed games), rather than one fixed one. I would not be surprised if an epidemic of early mental decline begins to show in gamers in coming decades. I'm 36 now and feel like my spatial reasoning is declining in a strange severe way.

Re: Taxi drivers rarely die of Alzheimer's

#174

Post by somenameforme »

cromka wrote: post #58
jrflo wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Always insane to me how people will just read the headline of an article and point out "flaws" based on what they assume the article says

People jump the gun to show their perceived intellectual superiority. Typically same kind of people are last to admit of a mistake.

It's not necessarily about intellectualism. Science in modern times is plagued by publish or perish. Researchers just need to get things published to keep working, and negative results don't get published. So I think people often publish stuff without proper controls/missing confounding variables/inversion of causality/etc not out of ignorance, but because they know the conclusion is dubious - but if they don't publish, they're going to be out of a job.

I don't think many realize how huge the replication crisis is. You have 75% of studies in a leading social psychology journal failing to replicate. [1] Another replication effort on preclinical medical studies found only 11% were able to be replicated, a replication effort on cancer studies found the average effect size to be 85% lower than published, and much more. If you assume most science headlines, at least outside of the traditional hard sciences, are false - you're substantially more likely to be right than wrong.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis#In_psycholo...

Re: Taxi drivers rarely die of Alzheimer's

#175

Post by cma »

jollyllama wrote: post #154
asdfasgasdgasdg wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could just be that whatever factor causes certain cabbies to live much longer than their cohort is also protective from Alzheimer’s. I guess they might have accounted for that too — I’ll have to look at the study.

Or, that if you can survive the thing that kills the rest of their cohort, it has beneficial tradeoffs. As in, perhaps smoking protects from Alzheimer's, if it doesn't kill you first.

Controlling for age in a profession with a high fatality rate like this seems like controlling for high alertness, consciousness, quick reaction times, and well restedness/low stress, low recreational drug and alcohol use.

Of those, sleep issues are highly correlated with Alzheimer's and also with auto accidents. Controlling for age alone here would select for low incidence of sleep issues.

Re: Taxi drivers rarely die of Alzheimer's

#176

Post by czhu12 »

I had to read this a few times to make sure I read it right

> After adjusting for age, sex, race, ethnicity and education, roughly 1 in 100 taxi and ambulance drivers died of Alzheimer’s, compared with 1 in 60 people overall

I would’ve thought the effects were more profound

Re: Taxi drivers rarely die of Alzheimer's

#177

Post by shuwix »

stymaar wrote: post #163
cortic wrote: post #30

Taxi Drivers: The mean age at death is approximately 67.8 years. 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.

It pains me to see such a low-effort contrarian comment at the top: as stated in TFA taxi drivers are below other profession when controlling for age, and there are multiple professions with lower life expectancy that still have significantly higher Alzheimer rate than taxi drivers.

[flagged]

Re: Taxi drivers rarely die of Alzheimer's

#180

Post by paxys »

stymaar wrote: post #163
cortic wrote: post #30

Taxi Drivers: The mean age at death is approximately 67.8 years. 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.

It pains me to see such a low-effort contrarian comment at the top: as stated in TFA taxi drivers are below other profession when controlling for age, and there are multiple professions with lower life expectancy that still have significantly higher Alzheimer rate than taxi drivers.

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