Alzheimer’s is considered a disease that occurs primarily in older people. Apparently it also plays a role what job you did. This emerges from a new study.
1.8 million Germans suffer from dementia. The term dementia encompasses more than 50 clinical pictures: The most common form is Alzheimer’s disease; around two thirds of people with dementia suffer from it. Now a study has shown that certain professional groups are apparently less susceptible.
The Harvard Medical School study evaluated the death certificates of almost nine million adults who died in the United States from 2020 to 2022. They worked in 443 different jobs. 1.69 percent of them died of Alzheimer’s.
What’s special: Only 1.03 percent of taxi drivers died of the disease, while the figure for ambulance drivers was only 0.91 percent. For comparison: these very low rates did not exist in other transport-related professions. 1.65 percent of bus drivers died of Alzheimer’s, while captains and pilots died at over two percent.
The researchers suspect that the fact that taxi and ambulance drivers constantly have to negotiate new routes could particularly stimulate one region of the brain – the hippocampus. This is where spatial memory and navigation are located. And the region is one of the first to be affected by Alzheimer’s dementia. As a result, sufferers often lose orientation.
Taxi and ambulance driving seems to particularly stimulate this area. However, the researchers emphasize that a direct causality cannot be derived that the driver’s profession is the cause of the low number of cases. Further research would be necessary for this.