Taxi drivers rarely die of Alzheimer's

Taxi and ambulance drivers have a lower risk of dying from Alzheimer's disease compared to workers in most other jobs, according to a 2024 study analyzing nearly 9 million U.S. death certificates from 2020 to 2022. The researchers found that roughly 1 in 100 taxi and ambulance drivers died from Alzheimer's, while 1 in 60 people overall died from the disease.

The key to reducing Alzheimer's risk appeared to be continuous real-time navigation, such as constantly locating oneself in space and updating a mental map as conditions changed. This mental work appears to exercise the hippocampus, the part of the brain responsible for memory and spatial navigation, which is one of the first regions to be damaged by Alzheimer's.

London taxi drivers, who undergo extensive spatial navigation training through a process called "The Knowledge," demonstrated increased gray matter in the posterior hippocampus, an area linked to large-scale spatial map storage. The study suggests that mentally engaging jobs, like cartography, urban planning, and geospatial analysis, may help protect against Alzheimer's disease by strengthening the hippocampus through sustained spatial reasoning.