So far this study hasn't been retracted or the authors accused of fraud.
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Archived from the IMDb Discussion Forums — The Soapbox
germtheory — 1 year ago(December 30, 2024 01:34 PM)
So far this study hasn't been retracted or the authors accused of fraud.
A new study found that U.S. taxi and ambulance drivers had the lowest percentage of deaths attributed to Alzheimer’s disease among more than 400 occupations. The drivers mostly worked before GPS navigation systems were widely used.
The researchers hypothesize that taxi and ambulance drivers could have a lower risk of developing Alzheimer’s because they are constantly using navigational and spatial processing, says Dr. Anupam Jena, a professor of health at Harvard Medical School and associate physician at Massachusetts General Hospital and senior author of the study.
“It’s probably unlikely that being a taxi driver prevented people from getting Alzheimer’s disease pathology in the brain, but it allowed them to mask some of the symptoms for longer,” says Dr. David Wolk, director of the University of Pennsylvania Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center.
In the latest study, 1.03% of taxi drivers and 0.91% of ambulance drivers died of Alzheimer’s disease, compared with 3.9% of everyone else, according to findings published in December in BMJ. The researchers used Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data from death certificates that list occupation and cause of death from 2020 to 2022.
Taxi and ambulance drivers didn’t have a lower risk of developing other types of dementia, which are often vascular diseases, notes Jena.
Playing Grand Theft Auto a lot might be similarly beneficial and should probably be covered by insurance. The other takeaway is that using GPS could worsen your risk.