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Taxi drivers rarely die of Alzheimer's

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Re: Taxi drivers rarely die of Alzheimer's

#181
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.

But on some level I understand the immediate low level criticism. Of course, it’s stupid to criticize something without reading about it. However, I’ve seen waaaay more studies which was made with even lower effort.

For example, the other day I wanted to figure out what’s the current state about whether gender equality causes measurable benefits for companies… and the studies are terrible. All of them. Most of them was about Norway, and almost all of them had a reference point in 2008, one of the largest economic crisis, and somehow most of them was even worse than this. They openly distorted statistics. Depending on what they wanted to achieve to one way or another. Even the most cited ones. It’s disgusting. The best ones could prove only that inequality is not inherent of economics, but social. But the agenda was different for them too, so they tried to lie something bigger, all the time, while this would be more than enough to support it.

Re: Taxi drivers rarely die of Alzheimer's

#182
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.

Isn't the mean age simply brought down by the number who die at a very young age due to car accidents, robberies, and other reasons? Not that cab drivers only live to 67 - many would still live to 75, 85, 95, but that occasionally a driver dies at 25 or 35 bringing the mean figure way down.

[flagged]

Re: Taxi drivers rarely die of Alzheimer's

#183
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.

[deleted]

Re: Taxi drivers rarely die of Alzheimer's

#184

> In one landmark 2000 study, neuroscientists compared the brains of licensed London taxi drivers with those of people who did not drive cabs. 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.

Correlation and causation and all that.

A number of the women in my wife's family have been diagnosed with Alzheimers. All of the women I know in her family also hate driving, because they find it very stressful.

It's plausible that people prone to Alzheimers are less likely to be comfortable driving.

Re: Taxi drivers rarely die of Alzheimer's

#185
post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its even worse than that, i can imagine people with undiagnosed early Alzheimer's self selecting for car accidents and cardiac issues through additional stress of mental fatigue while their brain tried to compensate for loss of function. So you have people self selecting out of the profession, self selecting for early death within the profession, and on top of that, a general life expectancy discrepancy that is near…

What happens in the age of self driving cars?

Fewer car accident deaths, leading to more elderly people, which inevitably means a higher population of people with Alzheimers.

(Unless people highly predisposed to dying in car accidents are also highly predisposed to mudering people who will have, but don’t yet have, Alzheimers. But that seems sufficiently unlikely for the purposes of this hypothetical.)

Jokes aside, the serious answer depends on whether the link is causative or merely collerative.

Re: Taxi drivers rarely die of Alzheimer's

#186
post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't the mean age simply brought down by the number who die at a very young age due to car accidents, robberies, and other reasons? Not that cab drivers only live to 67 - many would still live to 75, 85, 95, but that occasionally a driver dies at 25 or 35 bringing the mean figure way down.

[flagged]

?

Re: Taxi drivers rarely die of Alzheimer's

#187
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.

True. But, these are still odd outliers in terms of low life expectancy, and that's something that the actual BMJ article cited (https://www.bmj.com/content/387/bmj-2024-082194) or TFA talks about at all. The LE is low enough for both professions to be awkward.

I'm also a little concerned that the BMJ plot of risk adjusted mortality still shows a clear positive correlation with age at death, which I strongly suspect would turn out to be statistically significant. The adjustment does not appear to be correct, therefore, and while that might still preserve these odd findings, it's definitely not ideal.

The much better occupation, from the graph, is the third outlier -- mining and geological engineers. Life expectancy: 80.3, risk-adjusted mortality: 1.1%. Or, alternatively, economists are close too (80.6; 1.19%).

Aircraft pilots, btw, really were the opposite end of the scale (78.1; 2.3%), surprising enough to be noteworthy beyond a control (the BMJ article does discuss this a little, but seriously -- that's very surprising for a highly-educated profession).

Re: Taxi drivers rarely die of Alzheimer's

#188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alzheimer's is an entirely different beast than normal mental atrophy and there are plenty of stories of otherwise intelligent people ending up with it. I'm not saying you shouldn't try using your brain more but this is just like saying Stephen Hawking should have tried exercising more.

Would this not be closer to saying Arnold Schwarzenegger should have tried exercising more?

Both Stephen Hawking and Arnold Schwarzenegger would have benefitted from exercising more, if controlled for age

/s

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