At The Conversation, University of Texas environmental engineer Hatim Sharif offers some interesting data on the scourge of seniors, estimated to affect 7.2 people in the United States:

Taxi and ambulance drivers are less likely than workers in almost any other job to die of Alzheimer’s disease. That was the surprising result of a 2024 study examining the death certificates of nearly 9 million people in the U.S.

These findings stopped me in my tracks because those two jobs rely on the same thing as my own work: maps…

Of the 9 million death certificates from January 2020 to December 2022 that researchers examined, taxi and ambulance drivers had the lowest risk of dying from Alzheimer’s disease out of 443 occupations. After adjusting for age, sex, race, ethnicity and education, roughly 1 in 100 taxi and ambulance drivers died of Alzheimer’s, compared with 1 in 60 people overall.

“Taxi drivers rarely die of Alzheimer’s – how complex mental maps and spatial reasoning protect your brain,” August 6, 2026

Driving, as such, did not offer protection from the dread dementia; needing to constantly map place coordinates quickly in real time seems to make the difference.

The study attributed the lower Alzheimer mortality to observed changes in the hippocampus, associated with memory:

Deaths attributed to Alzheimer’s disease have doubled over the past three decades and will likely increase as the population ages.1 Despite decades of research, an important gap remains in the development of definitive treatment or prevention strategies.2 A landmark neuroimaging study showed that taxi drivers in London, UK, developed enhancing functional changes in the hippocampus.3 The hippocampus is the brain region involved in both the creation of cognitive spatial maps and the development of Alzheimer’s disease,45 which is associated with accelerated hippocampal atrophy.6 This finding raises the possibility that occupations that demand frequent spatial processing, such as taxi driving, may be associated with decreased Alzheimer’s disease mortality.

R Patel V, Liu M, Worsham CM, Jena AB. Alzheimer’s disease mortality among taxi and ambulance drivers: population based cross sectional study. BMJ. 2024 Dec 17;387:e082194. doi: 10.1136/bmj-2024-082194. PMID: 39689964; PMCID: PMC11648082.

Alzheimer is essentially a disease of memory

Significantly, “the pattern of low Alzheimer’s disease mortality among taxi and ambulance drivers was not observed when forms of dementia (vascular and unspecified) other than Alzheimer’s disease were evaluated, suggesting the possibility of changes mediated by the hippocampus in taxi and ambulance drivers lowering Alzheimer’s disease risk” (“Disease mortality”)

Also, the study found that “aircraft pilots and ship captains ranked as having the 4th and 23rd highest adjusted Alzheimer’s disease mortality.” But these jobs involve following preplanned routes, not making quick decisions based on a mental map of a physical region.

It’s certainly worthy of followup research.

Note: Some time in the near future, when I finish up a book manuscript, I hope to do a series on what we are learning about dementia and its prevention.