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Taxi drivers rarely die of Alzheimer's

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Re: Taxi drivers rarely die of Alzheimer's

#251

Post by stymaar »

roenxi wrote: post #211
stymaar wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Fella has read the article, has an argument and some stats. What more do you want from a comment? He isn't running a study. Besides, the point is a good one. There are a lot of professions. If we glance at the underlying study [0] Figure 1 suggests that we'd probably expect to see an outlier or two in that mess just through chance, we're expecting a few p [0] https://www.bmj.com/content/387/bmj-2024-082194

> Fella has read the article

Their argument doesn't show that at all though, they make an argument against an age bias when the article explicitly says age is being controlled for.

> Figure 1 suggests that we'd probably expect to see an outlier or two in that mess just through chance, we're expecting a few pThat's a valid point, and a much better criticism than the one I'm calling out. That doesn't redeem the original comment though.

Re: Taxi drivers rarely die of Alzheimer's

#252

Post by larodi »

Accidentally stumbled on an ESRI's GIS for Scienece volume... there was a cited evidence of MRI scans of high-scholers brains, monitored while kids develop spatial reasoning skills. Well the images definitely showed prefrontal cortex better developed, only after an year. So this is more than anecdotal evidence.

Re: Taxi drivers rarely die of Alzheimer's

#253

Post by creaturemachine »

KaiserPro wrote: post #242
nojvek wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Test may be no joke. But the test is also a joke in the world of GPS and Uber. I am glad Uber plowed through various stupid regulations constraining supply to bring a service with drastically more supply.

> I am glad Uber plowed through various stupid regulations What like safety checks? London had a huge minicab system, which is very much not knowledge based. Addison lee also had internet booking of cabs way before uber, but with the advantage that cars were roadworthy and the drivers were safety vetted. TFL came down hard on uber 1 for safety and 2 for clogging up the fucking roads and making busses slow. (see https…

It's very comforting when your cabbie knows exactly where you want to go with one prompt, versus being with some uber droid who can't look past their phone.

Re: Taxi drivers rarely die of Alzheimer's

#254

Post by bean469 »

nojvek wrote: post #222
neuralkoi wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have to memorize 25,000 streets. The test is no joke. [0] [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ur61kzXjvN8

Test may be no joke. But the test is also a joke in the world of GPS and Uber. I am glad Uber plowed through various stupid regulations constraining supply to bring a service with drastically more supply.

> But the test is also a joke in the world of GPS and Uber.

Uber drivers are generally a joke compared to black cab drivers in pretty much every way

Re: Taxi drivers rarely die of Alzheimer's

#255

Post by throwaway2037 »

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.

From the article:

    > 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.
Does that answer your concern?

Re: Taxi drivers rarely die of Alzheimer's

#256

Post by kfarr »

lelanthran wrote: post #209
kfarr wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Learning new languages (and actually using them) is a great way to do this for all ages!

I'm bilingual. Learning new languages is pointless if you have no one to talk to in the new language. Language skills atrophy surprisingly fast.

I agree, one must actually use a language for it to contribute to brain plasticity in later ages.

Re: Taxi drivers rarely die of Alzheimer's

#257

Post by compass_copium »

FrustratedMonky wrote: post #234
afavour wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Fella has read the article Then not closely enough? The study adjusts for age, which is the core of OP’s criticism.

"study adjusts for age" maybe it would help this thread to have someone explain exactly how they control for age, if everyone in the range they want to study, is already dead. What is the actual process to control for age? This comes up a lot, and the only response is "oh, well, we controlled for that", well exactly how? Seriously, I'm curious. //lot of downvotes, not a lot of anybody actually able to explain it. Fro…

As long as a researcher said "we controlled for confounding variables," there are plenty of people willing to take it at face value.

It's really difficult (maybe not possible) to do that in these large retrospective studies. Shingles vaccine preventing dementia, GLP-1 drugs preventing just about everything, etc, etc. There are plenty of good faith critiques of this kind of work from actual medical researchers making essentially the same point as the OP.

Re: Taxi drivers rarely die of Alzheimer's

#258

Post by jmull »

nylonstrung wrote: post #233
jstummbillig wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The comment insinuates that the study did not control for age. The study controlled for age. It's not terrible to not make a good point, but it's not a good point. The not good points should not be ranked highly.

It's getting hard to find any study posted without a kneejerk "correlation does not equal causation" take as if that's not something researchers have to control for in order to even conduct the study in the first place, let alone publish

> kneejerk "correlation does not equal causation"

The article (and apparently the researchers too) advances the idea there's a causal link here, even though one is not shown by the research. They go so far as to generally prescribe spatial reasoning training as a way to reduce Alzheimers risk.

You might be tired of hearing "correlation does not equal causation", but it needs to be said here.

Re: Taxi drivers rarely die of Alzheimer's

#259

Post by bluGill »

bob_theslob646 wrote: post #159
cortic wrote: 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?

I'm still waiting on someone unbiased to study the data and tell me something. Those who have obvious biases tell me self driving cars are good, but their bias makes them suspect sources. So far I've not found someone without an obvious bias who had the data and is talking.

Re: Taxi drivers rarely die of Alzheimer's

#260

Post by bluGill »

lelanthran wrote: post #209
kfarr wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Learning new languages (and actually using them) is a great way to do this for all ages!

I'm bilingual. Learning new languages is pointless if you have no one to talk to in the new language. Language skills atrophy surprisingly fast.

The claim was learning is important. Not the ability to communicate with it. There are more than 7000 known languages in the world, study a different one every week...

I have no idea what the truth is here...

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