Arriving at the end of your studies without really knowing what you want to do next is commonplace. Some choose a job out of spite, taking what comes to them, others think for weeks, even years, about the job that would be perfect for them. If you’re still thinking about your next career, a new study finds that driving an ambulance or taxi as part of your job may offer some protection against Alzheimer’s disease.
This discovery, relayed by ScienceAlert, is the result of an analysis of millions of certificates of people who died between 2020 and 2022. However, the team from Harvard Medical School (United States) at the origin of the study specifies that the results do not prove that spending your days transporting the sick and injured or driving a little too drunk passengers in the middle of the night reduces the risk of Alzheimer’s disease.
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The brain is complex and this study suggests that the link between the profession exercised and the disease needs to be explored further. This could lead to ways of better preventing it, or even slowing down its progression. For Vishal Patel, doctor at Brigham and Women’s Hospital (United States), the link is very clear: “The part of the brain that is involved in creating cognitive maps is the same part that is involved in the development of Alzheimer’s disease.” This part of the brain is called the “hippocampus” and it plays a central role in cognition, memory, learning and spatial orientation.
A question of profession… and age
With age, the volume of the hippocampus reduces, which is often associated with memory problems. In fact, being a taxi or ambulance driver would have an impact on the brain: “We believe that, compared to other occupations, those that require real-time spatial and navigation analysis may be associated with reduced mortality from Alzheimer’s disease,” explains Vishal Patel.
Using death certificates, the team of researchers was able to identify the occupations of 8,972,221 people. They noted that Alzheimer’s disease appeared as the underlying cause of death for 348,328 of them. After adjusting for factors such as age at death, 1.03% of taxi driver deaths and 0.91% of ambulance driver deaths were thought to be linked to Alzheimer’s disease. Minimal figures compared to those of the general population (1.69%).
However, this study is criticized by Tara Spires-Jones, a neuroscientist at the University of Edinburgh (Scotland), because other information may come into play and influence how the results are interpreted. She emphasizes that “the age of death for taxi and ambulance drivers in this study was approximately 64-67 years, compared to 74 years for all other occupations.” However, she specifies that “The age at which Alzheimer’s appears is usually after 65, meaning taxi and ambulance drivers could have developed it if they had lived longer.”
The authors of the study specify that they “consider these results not as conclusive, but as hypothesis-generating”. More in-depth research could make it possible to discover a little more about this neurodegenerative disease which affects 900,000 people in France, with 225,000 new cases detected each year.
