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- Hacker News
- Something with more data:by amelius
- Related:
Alzheimer's disease mortality among taxi and ambulance drivers (2024)
229 points, 4 months ago, 137 comments
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47559481
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Taxi drivers offer a clue to Alzheimer's risk
127 points, Dec 2024, 109 comments
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42502899
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Alzheimer's Mortality Lowest for Taxi, Ambulance Drivers
12 points, Dec 2024, 9 comments
by emil-lp - The ones that do stopped being taxi drivers.by chuckadams
- Could it be that the cause/effect relationship here is incorrect? Perhaps only people with the cognitive skills for complex mental maps and spatial reasoning can be effective at driving a cab, so driving a cab may not "protect" you from Alzheimer's at all, but people who have the skills to keep a job as a cab driver have a brain that is less susceptible to Alzheimer's.by anonymousiam
- I find the title highly misleading. The actual claim is a 40% lower chance (1 in 100 as opposed to 1 in 60) for taxi and ambulance drivers when compared to the average. That’s a big drop but the title implies that Alzheimer’s is rare in taxi drivers specifically and I don’t think the difference warrants that claim whatsoever.by YmiYugy
- I wonder how it will look when we start doing statistics on gamers, if AI doesn't destroy our brains first. Then it would be interesting to plot the different death by genre like for example strategy, FPS, puzzle, etc. Someone else asked about Chess players which is probably also related right.
My grandad essentially died of alzheimers and he just loved to sit and watch football all day where you don't really need to think much.
by intellix - > 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.
by walthamstow - 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.
by cortic