Can a job protect you from Alzheimer's? Researchers find two that could do that

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Researchers at Harvard Medical School analyzed the numbers from nearly 9 million U.S. death certificates issued between 2020 and 2022, looking for links between jobs and Alzheimer's as a cause of death. It seems that being on the move could be beneficial.

Of nearly 9 million people with occupational certifications in the U.S. National Vital Statistics System, 3.88 percent had Alzheimer's disease listed as the cause of death, a figure 348,328 people.

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According to the study conducted by Dr. Anupam Jena of Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, however, only 1.03 percent of taxi drivers and only 0.74 percent of ambulance drivers died of Alzheimer's disease.

The connection seems intuitive. This type of work requires the brain to create and reference spatial maps. In fact, research from the turn of the century found that London taxi drivers had physical changes in their brains compared to other taxi drivers of similar age, education and intelligence. Recent studies have even shown differences in the brains of new taxi drivers before and after they were prepared for a rigorous test of their memory of London streets, a data collection known as “The Knowledge.”

“The same part of the brain that is involved in creating cognitive spatial maps – which we use to navigate the world around us – is also involved in the development of Alzheimer's disease,” said Dr. Vishal Patel, another author of the study and an assistant physician in the Department of Surgery at Brigham and Women's Hospital.

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“We hypothesized that jobs such as taxi driving and ambulance driving, which require real-time spatial and navigational processing, may be associated with a lower mortality burden from Alzheimer's disease compared to other jobs.”

Jena added: “Our results raise the possibility that neurological changes in the hippocampus or elsewhere in taxi and ambulance drivers may be responsible for the lower rates of Alzheimer's.”

Nevertheless, he cautioned against reading too much into the study. “We do not view these results as conclusive, but rather as hypothesis-generating,” he said. “But they point out that it is important to think about how jobs may affect the risk of dying from Alzheimer's disease and whether cognitive activities can potentially be preventive.”

Other types of dementia, such as vascular dementia – caused by impaired blood flow to the brain – did not show the same association as Alzheimer's disease, according to the study.

And other transportation-related jobs that didn't require as much real-time spatial and navigational processing didn't produce the same results as taxi or ambulance drivers. Bus drivers, for example, came 263rd in the list. And ship captains and airplane pilots were at the highest risk of dying from the disease.

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It's also worth noting that other factors could play a role.

“The age of death for taxi and ambulance drivers in this study was around 64 to 67, while for all other professions it was 74,” noted neuroscientist Tara Spires-Jones of the University of Edinburgh in response to the study. “The age of onset for Alzheimer’s is typically over 65, meaning the taxi and ambulance drivers might have developed Alzheimer’s if they had lived longer.”

She also pointed out that compared to all other professions (48 percent), women are less likely than men to be taxi drivers and ambulance drivers (10 to 22 percent). “This is important because women are more likely to develop Alzheimer’s disease than men,” she said.

It is also possible that people predisposed to Alzheimer's disease avoid memory-intensive jobs in the first place, or that some of the subjects spent relatively little time in their “main job” and perhaps only started it later in life.

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