Want to lower your Alzheimer’s risk? Taxi drivers offer a clue

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Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Here’s one strategy that might preserve your brain: Ditch Google Maps and rely on your own sense of direction. 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. Those on-the-fly decisions about how to get from point A to point B when a road is closed or blocked may protect the drivers’ cognitive abilities, the researchers speculate. “They’re making decisions literally every few seconds about where to go, where to turn," says Jena.

“The way that your brain is used over the course of your career or the course of your life might impact the likelihood that someone develops dementia." The research supports other evidence that education and brain stimulation may help to at least delay symptoms of Alzheimer’s. An earlier study concluded that dementia risk was lower among people with cognitively stimulating jobs compared with those whose jobs were more repetitive, according to the 2021 research in the journal BMJ that looked at the occupations of more than 100,000 people across multiple studies. “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,"