Alzheimer's Mortality Lowest for Taxi, Ambulance Drivers | Hacker News Reader

Alzheimer's Mortality Lowest for Taxi, Ambulance Drivers

medpagetoday.com

12 pointsspeckx9 comments

isn't that because they get booted out of the profession, not because the profession had magical cognitive benefits from using that part of the brain?

Thought the same. Survivorship bias: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias

Yes, especially since the study looked at professions on death certificates (likely to be last profession). There are many better ways to do this.

Studies like this that are obviously flawed to anyone with a modicum of actual scientific/stats knowledge being called "landmark" studies really casts doubt on peer review. Sad to see this behavior yet again from researchers in the Alzheimer's field. How many more billions of donations must be wasted by "scientists" that don't understand basic statistics before something changes?

This is one of those articles you need to read: the headline and summary line are misleading.

> Other types of dementia didn't show the same relationship as Alzheimer's disease. And other transportation-related jobs that didn't require as much real-time spatial and navigational processing didn't have the same results as taxi or ambulance drivers. Bus drivers, for example, ranked 263rd.

The hypothesis of the paper is that a larger hippocampus may contribute to lower rates of Alzheimer’s, inviting more investigation. The study authors admit there’s not a ton that can be concluded with certainty.

Very obvious fake science. I 100% guarantee you that if you take an unbiased look at the data, all the variance will be explained by something like age or occupation selection bias.

As the article says, ambulance drivers die on average at 64.

Even the idea is absurd. "Occupation" is already an extremely vague category which heavily confounds numerous very obvious risk factors. The best statistical methods won't help you make a crisp signal out of pure noise.

It also ridiculous how they just handwave that the hypothesis fails for other occupations.

Supposedly they compensated for that. They have a "Limitations" section in which they discuss some potential pitfalls, including how most alzheimers deaths start after age 65.

I will say, it doesn't inspire confidence when Figure 2 of your paper has an enormous typo on it ("Aircarft [sic] Pilots").

I'm not really convinced personally, especially as stuff like Aircarft[sic] pilots seems to be significantly above the average occupation's risk factor. But they also tend to live significantly longer (78 ish?).

It seems to me that navigation is still a reasonable amount of a pilots workload -- just look at the effort to navigate the taxiways at a big airport for example.

A bigger factor in my view would be quality of care -- an airline pilot probably makes significantly more than a taxi driver, and is more likely to have good medical care, in which someone is more attentive to their situation.

I have serious doubts about the statistical controls you can do in the presence of very obvious and large confounders. Especially when the thesis doesn't seem to generalize particularly well (as they admit). Is there something cab drivers do, which is radically different from the numerous other driving occupations?

Personally I find these very broad studies extremely uninteresting. Without making any accusations, having large,very broad datasets, make it very easy to find something, when there is just noise. What makes me despise it even more are the headlines it generates.

Makes me wonder if video games would have a similar effect, when you have to navigate in a 3d world.

Sorry, I don't get this:

> Mean age at death was about 68 for taxi drivers and 64 for ambulance drivers

Can someone explain it?

Huh? In which country, years?

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