Source?
That is, I'd expect cases of Alzheimer deaths to be higher in the wealthy just because I'd expect they would live longer and not die of other ailments before Alzheimer's "got them".
I would like to see how the prevalence of Alzheimer's among Neurosurgeons compares against a population with similar work/sleep schedules (eg. finance)
However, IMO you can do things to mitigate this but it involves paying workers who aren't working at full capacity; basically doubling staffing costs I think. If you have a large shift handover period, a staff member doesn't take on a new patient unless they can finish their active input within the shift, it goes to the people sitting idle waiting on the next shift - people are never under a single worker for less than a half-shift; so you can't start with one nurse for half-an-hour at handover and then get passed on, you'd start with that nurse and get half-shift + ½hour. At the back end of the shift the nurse -- and other personnel -- would not be taking on new patients who couldn't be signed-off within their shift, meaning they have fewer patients, meaning they can focus more on handover of the patients for whom it's necessary.
There's probably holes in that, it's like reverse pipelining.
You might get enough effect by having a smaller overlap and having workers shadow the worker who is going off-shift but that's not really reducing handovers so much.
Whether we have the balance right in terms of maximizing repetition vs. minimizing mistakes from tiredness is a good question, but it's not a given that reducing the number of hours worked for surgeons would improve patient survival without a great deal of care in how (e.g. ensuring you cut their number of hours without reducing their critical skillset).
The airline industry was forced to stop pushing people so hard, the medical profession should do the same.
The only way to be sure would be to perform detailed autopsies on a large random sample of the population.