Taxi drivers rarely die of Alzheimer's
theconversation.com
theconversation.com
General Population: in the same dataset, life expectancy averaged 74 years.
The average age at which patients are typically diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease is 79.
People in these jobs don't live long enough on average to get diagnosed, at the same rate. The same effect will happen in any job that lowers your life expectancy.
For from the look of it it doesn't look like an exceptionally hard job (btw a brother of mine did years of "VTC": "Vehicule de Tourisme avec Chauffeur", basically high-end taxis without the "taxi" logo).
2. The original study didn't just study taxi drivers, but also ambulance drivers. I doubt that their life expectancy is that much lower.
Define "hard job". Carrying heavy objects?
Odd hours, sitting too much, inhaling too many exhaust fumes, having people yell at you if _they're_ late.
Sounds like a fairly hard job.
There are jobs stressful on the mind too - and some of them have very low "life expectancies".
I don't think many realize how huge the replication crisis is. You have 75% of studies in a leading social psychology journal failing to replicate. [1] Another replication effort on preclinical medical studies found only 11% were able to be replicated, a replication effort on cancer studies found the average effect size to be 85% lower than published, and much more. If you assume most science headlines, at least outside of the traditional hard sciences, are false - you're substantially more likely to be right than wrong.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis#In_psycholo...
This is very true. In my PhD research, I managed to perfectly predict the placebo effect using a random forest. Now, this was actually due to sampling variance, and the finding went away when I averaged over splits.
I often wonder if I'd still been in academia when this happened, if I would have been able to resist the siren call of a Nature/Science paper (and the consequent career benefits).
I doubt OP's jaded response was alluding to your insight, but still thanks for that, it's genuinely good to know.
'Why ‟controlling for a variable” doesn't (usually) work' - https://dynomight.net/control/
Other things that don't work, including four other 'controlling for a variable' entries at items 39 through 43: https://dynomight.net/things/
Dan Olweus did several of them in the 70s and 80s, and fought to his dying day against programs which didn't have casual intervention studies backing them.
Also, older ones were exposed to a ton of cigarette smoke.
Sure they might be better and per unit of time they drive they must have miniscule amount of accidents.
But if there's a 0.001% chance per hour driven, then over enough hours a few accidents are inevitable.
Pedestrians are a lot more at risk. So that's unsurprising that annually 1/2 taxi driver might be fatally injured in one.
But I would assume the ratio of other drivers to taxi drivers would be high enough that this number should be zero as well.
That's actually crazy if that's as low as you dare guess. I would have easily guessed it was like, a fraction of a percent. 1 in 10 would be fucking nuts.
"For each occupation, we first calculated the percentage of deaths due to Alzheimer’s disease and the mean age at death in years (ie, average life expectancy). We plotted the association between these two variables, with each observation reflecting a single occupation. The purpose of this analysis was to illustrate the need to account for the person’s age at death since the risk of Alzheimer’s disease rises with age and therefore Alzheimer’s mortality would naturally be lower in occupations with a lower life expectancy."
then don't post
So no indication they accounted for the expected lifespan of the profession.
It’s a plausible hypothesis but it’s really really hard to tease things out and controlling for age is the obvious thing but that doesn’t get you the conclusive result you think it does.
Delay your aging by using your brain a fuck ton, all the time, learning brand new things nowhere near anything you already know.
Language skills atrophy surprisingly fast.
I have no idea what the truth is here...
[0]: There were 10 distinct languages, making up 98% of all languages in the empire. My understanding is that most citizens had to learn German, even though only 20% of the population spoke German as a mother tongue. Also a few different language branches (Germanic, Ugric, Slavic, Romance), with one of those branches (Ugric) not being Indo-European at all. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_and_religious_compositi...
I'm not saying you shouldn't try using your brain more but this is just like saying Stephen Hawking should have tried exercising more.
/s
Being intelligent doesn’t mean you still learn new things as you age. Using your brain doesn’t do anything, it’s using your brain in novel ways.
That companion is also bunk. Two entirely different diseases.
Of those, sleep issues are highly correlated with Alzheimer's and also with auto accidents. Controlling for age alone here would select for low incidence of sleep issues.
So you have people self selecting out of the profession, self selecting for early death within the profession, and on top of that, a general life expectancy discrepancy that is near impossible to adjust for.
(Unless people highly predisposed to dying in car accidents are also highly predisposed to mudering people who will have, but don’t yet have, Alzheimers. But that seems sufficiently unlikely for the purposes of this hypothetical.)
Jokes aside, the serious answer depends on whether the link is causative or merely collerative.
Where? What country/ies?
not to mention the other devil in these studies: some professions are statistically going to have the lowest rate of every possible disease. you can't just cherrypick outliers and declare "causal!"
Every top-level thread is like a multiple choice armchair takedown.
Here's an interesting counterpoint. "Unthinkable" presented studies of navigation tasks in 2D/3D and testing/training. Hippocampus measurements correlated with skill and training. Interestingly, this skill and training and measurements all correlated with beneficial responses in a disaster (as in, not panicking). Weird right?
For example, the other day I wanted to figure out what’s the current state about whether gender equality causes measurable benefits for companies… and the studies are terrible. All of them. Most of them was about Norway, and almost all of them had a reference point in 2008, one of the largest economic crisis, and somehow most of them was even worse than this. They openly distorted statistics. Depending on what they wanted to achieve to one way or another. Even the most cited ones. It’s disgusting. The best ones could prove only that inequality is not inherent of economics, but social. But the agenda was different for them too, so they tried to lie something bigger, all the time, while this would be more than enough to support it.
I'm also a little concerned that the BMJ plot of risk adjusted mortality still shows a clear positive correlation with age at death, which I strongly suspect would turn out to be statistically significant. The adjustment does not appear to be correct, therefore, and while that might still preserve these odd findings, it's definitely not ideal.
The much better occupation, from the graph, is the third outlier -- mining and geological engineers. Life expectancy: 80.3, risk-adjusted mortality: 1.1%. Or, alternatively, economists are close too (80.6; 1.19%).
Aircraft pilots, btw, really were the opposite end of the scale (78.1; 2.3%), surprising enough to be noteworthy beyond a control (the BMJ article does discuss this a little, but seriously -- that's very surprising for a highly-educated profession).
Being mentally active (or physically active?) IIRC makes actual plaques both less likely, but also less detectable - a taxi driver can forget 90% of what they know and still not get diagnosed because they don't get lost on the way to the shops. Also they are often masters of small talk.
I would suspect this would eliminate a lot of the experiments participants, as only people who go for regular cognitive check-ups might be eligible?
I cannot imagine there would be many people left who'd be eligible. I can only think of 1 person that does it.. and he obviously does it for the pure satisfaction of acing those cognitive tests, and not because he is showing worrying amounts of decline in his mental faculties.
Besides, the point is a good one. There are a lot of professions. If we glance at the underlying study [0] Figure 1 suggests that we'd probably expect to see an outlier or two in that mess just through chance, we're expecting a few p<0.01. Taxi drivers doing unusually well doesn't seem especially impressive in that light, especially since it is one of the professions that seem to die off rather young and we might expect one of those professions to do rather well on Alzheimers.
It's not terrible to not make a good point, but it's not a good point. The not good points should not be ranked highly.
It turns out that there is a profession with a lowest risk of getting Alzheimer's (duh, one had to exist) and it looks like a slight outlier (it's the lowest, we'd expect that one to look like a slight outlier). As outliers go it isn't that impressive, it looks like it is part of a fairly boring distribution. We just plotted 400 data points on the graph, the 1/400 chance weird data point is going to look a little weird. We're actually just reading a lot into the fact that the 2nd data point in ambulance drivers which isn't all that convincing.
Not to knock the study, I'm sure it is a great study. Lots of science done. They do good graphs and all that. But the study appears to be telling me that Alzheimer's is random with respect to occupation and ideally don't spend so much time on the road if you want to live to see old age.
Adjusting for age, Alzheimers deaths were 1/100 for taxi drivers, and 1/60 for the general public. That's extremely significant. However you feel about the graphs means nothing compared to the actual numbers presented here.
> I'm sure it is a great study. Lots of science done. They do good graphs and all that.
Your choice to be dismissively anti-science helps to explain the bad point you're making.
What makes you think that is significant at all? Anytime you take a lot of small subsets of a large random sample you expect to find outliers that look a lot like this.
That is https://xkcd.com/882/ seems to better fix the data just as well.
To be clear I'm not claiming in one direction or the other. I feel that if you're going to attempt to discredit a piece of work it's on you to do such a basic check.
Really the whole point of that xkcd was to viscerally illustrate the practical effect of binary misclassification, or alternatively to make the point that a p of 0.05 isn't necessarily as rigorous as you might expect. Neither of those things directly applies here.
In the study they seem put the P value of the taxi driver outcome at <0.01 (in Table 2, although I admit I haven't read the thing especially closely). For 400 data points, we expect there to be around 4 values with a P value less than <0.01.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/68%E2%80%9395%E2%80%9399.7_rul...
They aren't being anti-science and it's low-quality to suggest they are.
The article (and apparently the researchers too) advances the idea there's a causal link here, even though one is not shown by the research. They go so far as to generally prescribe spatial reasoning training as a way to reduce Alzheimers risk.
You might be tired of hearing "correlation does not equal causation", but it needs to be said here.
The misunderstanding here is widespread so it worth calling out.
It’s actually kind of funny that people are more sick of the mistake being pointed out over and over than of the mistake being made over and over.
If a study found people who swim regularly are are less likely to get heart disease, that wouldn't be very surprising because know a lot about why people get heart disease. Therefore it would be valid to insist on more rigour for accepting (swimming => less heart disease) because the only use of that information is for health advice.
However even weak statistical correlations can be a valid lead for further research into Alzheimer's disease if they suggest where to look. You don't need to prove that signposts are correct in order to use them.
It's absolutely not worth publication with clickbait title and distorted description to the general public.
Then not closely enough? The study adjusts for age, which is the core of OP’s criticism.
maybe it would help this thread to have someone explain exactly how they control for age, if everyone in the range they want to study, is already dead.
What is the actual process to control for age? This comes up a lot, and the only response is "oh, well, we controlled for that", well exactly how?
Seriously, I'm curious.
//lot of downvotes, not a lot of anybody actually able to explain it.
From Article, the age question does seem sketchy.
"Although proportional mortality analyses do not provide information about the population at risk, with careful selection of controls and risk adjustment for factors that may affect competing risks (eg, age, sex, and social class), these values can still serve as a useful indicator of variations in disease frequency across different occupations.16 17"
It's really difficult (maybe not possible) to do that in these large retrospective studies. Shingles vaccine preventing dementia, GLP-1 drugs preventing just about everything, etc, etc. There are plenty of good faith critiques of this kind of work from actual medical researchers making essentially the same point as the OP.
You build a model that describes how likely people are to get diagnosed with Alzhimer's as a function of sex: maybe 12 women out of 100 get it, while 8/100 men are diagnosed. You can do the same thing for age: almost nobody is diagnosed before 30, it's very rare before 40, and sadly common (~1 in 10) after 65 years of age. There are all sorts of mathematical tricks to include multiple variables, account for the fact that you can only be diagnosed once, or that data is "censored" (i.e., missing) at some ages because people have already died.
Based on that, you can then ask if the prevalence of Alzheimer's Disease among cab drivers is surprising, given their demographics. For example, if we know that they skew male and younger, we'd expect that number to be a bit lower than a naive estimate of 10%. In fact, we can calculate that number and then see if it's unexpected given the number we actually see. In practice, you'd actually do this by fitting two models: one containing job and one that doesn't, and see which one best describes the data and how, specifically, the job factor affects the outcome.
However, how well these adjustments work depends on the quality of your data and your modelling. Your model could be missing important factors or have the wrong structure: (e.g., you assume risk is directly proportional to age, but it actually increases more rapidly as you get older). Your data could have problems too: maybe women are more likely to go to the doctor (and thus get diagnosed), even if the actual prevalence is the same.
Their argument doesn't show that at all though, they make an argument against an age bias when the article explicitly says age is being controlled for.
> Figure 1 suggests that we'd probably expect to see an outlier or two in that mess just through chance, we're expecting a few p<0.01.
That's a valid point, and a much better criticism than the one I'm calling out. That doesn't redeem the original comment though.
Plausible scenario. Individuals predisposed to Alzheimer’s experience different mental sharpness from birth and this makes them enjoy taxi driving less (more intense than long-haul trucking), and so they pursue taxi driving as a career at lower rates. Under this scenario, driving has no effect, it just induces a selection bias.
They claim to control for these factors in the 5th paragraph of the article here. Which is a standard thing to do in these kind of studies.
So you're point is either not relevant or that they didn't control for age correctly?
> 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.
There is no reason to believe they have enough data to adjust for any of their controls. It looks to me like they plotted everything and then found the "outlier" which statistically we know will exist in a true random sample.
Is every case of dementia diagnosed accurately? Is there a difference between professions how likely their dementia is to be diagnosed accurately?
Is there a correlation between dying early and being pre-disposed to have developed Alzheimer if having lived longer? If there is, then the "correction" for age is not correct, because the correction assumes the fraction of the group that died early were equally likely as the rest of the group to develop the disease if they had not died early.
I don't know anything about Alzheimer but it doesn't seem unthinkable that the factors that cause people to die early also could also play a role in causing Alzheimer.
That said, suggesting it is related to the career as opposed to, say, the fact that a higher percentage of taxi drivers carry some other set of genes or genetic markers that either led them in some way to become a taxi driver or contributed to a lack of development of the disorder, is pretty weak. In the United States and I think a few other countries the number of taxi drivers which are immigrants from a handful of countries outnumbers any other type.
And, the world has changed a lot. Are 1980s cab drivers and 1950s cab drivers and 1965 cab drivers and cab drivers from 2007 comparable? are car service and livery drivers?
Location is very important here. London cabbies have to pass The Knowledge which is an extremely difficult memory exam that only people with particular kind of brain can do.
When I was in my early 20s I had a job delivering pizza. I very quickly learned the delivery area, I knew pretty much every street and alleyway and shortcut to get from one place to another. Much smaller than London but I think the human brain is very good at remembering routes and where things are in an area, as this would have been an evolutionary advantage (go out hunting and be able to find your way back). No GPS, didn't even carry a map with me. We had a large map on the wall at the store, and if I had to deliver to a street I didn't recognize I'd find it on the map, see where it was relative to the streets I did know, and then I never had any problem finding places.
But in any case, I found that if you want to remember routes, it is far better to study the route before you begin driving, and then not rely on CarPlay altogether. This gives you much higher awareness of street names and directions.
Here's an example https://www.amazon.com/example/dp/B0FZSFWJQR that I'm not endorsing.
My parents had the same model van, but an earlier year; we didn't have the fancy digital compass mirror, just a suction cup compass ball.
As a bonus you can even set your general location on the mirror for extra accuracy, since the earth's magnetic line directions differ a bit based on location.
What? In my country at least (France), taxis have been a thing even in the countryside for as long as cars existed (or rather, as long as the telephone has). And I'd be very surprised if that wasn't also the case in most of Western Europe.
In fact it's a much easier job when it comes to routing and knowing your passengers' destinations than doing it in a metropolis.
More than one time I got stuck somewhere and had to walk 4 hours home.
This was not the case everywhere. For instance, Ireland deregulated taxis in 2002, and service improved massively after that.
It's funny how many amazing tech developments are really just a reaction to the peculiar pathologies of American/SF culture.
Not at all, it's more like 6 hours if you're in a somewhat remote place, but most taxi trips are way smaller than that even in rural area anyway.
> Not to mention that the population in this usa countryside is already way lower then any population density in the whole of France.
I don't think it matters, as there are plenty of rural places in the US that still have a higher density than where I live.
> Operating a taxi corp there would simply be not viable on a financial term.
Probably not a taxi “corp”, but here taxis have always been independent businesses with one or two cabs an providing taxi service on an area of a few hundred of square kilometers (a radius of 50km or so around the "office" of the taxi driver). And a large fraction of the trips are not on demand, but upon reservation several days in advance (you know you'll need to go to a medical appointment to the city next month, or you need a ride to the train station later this week).
Also, The Knowledge Test is, IIRC, passed only once and then you do not have to retake it for the rest of your career.
If a test passed in your 20s or 30s predicted accurately a much lower incidence of Alzheimer's in your 60s, that would be a remarkably strong early signal. Not impossible, but worth extra scrutiny. For the vast majority of old age conditions, we cannot predict them so long in advance.
If you get into a black cab in London and ask to be taken to any location, anywhere within 6 miles of Charing Cross, that driver will know immediately the right route to take without satnav. To get to that point they need to know 25,000 streets and many, many landmarks - statues, museums, galleries, restaurants, hotels, and so on.
I used to regularly drink with a cabbie in London, and he said that every time somebody got in the back his heart rate would rise, as he'd realise he's "on" and about to have to work out where to head from scratch. Within 30 seconds he'd have every step of the way worked out, down to which lanes at which intersections, no matter where in London he was or where he was going.
That's the thing that's likely going to reduce Alzheimer's.
It would also be interesting to look at sleep traces of cabbies.
In the same way that you have code smell.
Granted, some use GPS, but most only really use it for pickup
He told me he was so jealous of all this new computer stuff I get to play with. I think about that a lot this year
Stuff like "I'm your grandson, dadsnames kid" didn't parse at all, they said not to bring up shit like that so we didn't.
We had to move him into a house because he kept using his POW training to break out of the dementia ward. Pickpocketing keycards and shit, he was a badass till the end.
Today this knowledge is arguably less useful.
That's yours speculation, isn't it?Because if so, it would corroborate the same conclusion, i.e. if you exercise your memory regularly, you are less likely to develop Alzheimer's.
There's a fantastic Tom Scott video on it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZmWREtcDVBE
I am glad Uber plowed through various stupid regulations constraining supply to bring a service with drastically more supply.
What like safety checks?
London had a huge minicab system, which is very much not knowledge based. Addison lee also had internet booking of cabs way before uber, but with the advantage that cars were roadworthy and the drivers were safety vetted.
TFL came down hard on uber 1 for safety and 2 for clogging up the fucking roads and making busses slow. (see https://bsky.app/profile/garius.bsky.social for more info)
"which $generic_street_name? the one near covent garden, or the one near Bow?"
saves both time and money
Uber drivers are generally a joke compared to black cab drivers in pretty much every way
I would have expected someone to publish research comparing crimes against passengers by rideshare drivers versus taxi drivers by now, but a quick attempt to find that came up short due to lack of data about taxi drivers.
A number of the women in my wife's family have been diagnosed with Alzheimers. All of the women I know in her family also hate driving, because they find it very stressful.
It's plausible that people prone to Alzheimers are less likely to be comfortable driving.
My grandad essentially died of alzheimers and he just loved to sit and watch football all day where you don't really need to think much.
Their content publication history should be a good metric for establishing our future subjects and departed ones as engaging in above average gameplay for each specific genre.
I’ve always found it fascinating that I could recall essentially turn by turn navigation of WoW classic routes in which I spent countless hours. I’ve always thought about trying the memory palace technique and using those routes which would probably work well.
And the second thing: What about modern taxi drivers that rely almost exclusively on GPS?
> Research on cognitive maps points toward the same conclusion as the study on taxi drivers. In 2023, researchers ran a machine learning model on more than 22,500 people in a national dataset and were able to predict which ZIP codes had higher rates of Alzheimer’s with 84% accuracy based on how complex the environment was. Those living in spatially complex surroundings – the kind that force active map building, such as dense street networks with numerous intersections, diverse points of interest and landmarks, and multiple path options – were less likely to develop Alzheimer’s.
Alzheimer's disease mortality among taxi and ambulance drivers (2024)
229 points, 4 months ago, 137 comments
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47559481
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Taxi drivers offer a clue to Alzheimer's risk
127 points, Dec 2024, 109 comments
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42502899
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Alzheimer's Mortality Lowest for Taxi, Ambulance Drivers
12 points, Dec 2024, 9 comments
In addition there's the social component of driving - you may not always want to talk to a Taxi driver but many people do. And ambulance drivers are often socializing with their colleagues
Driving also has a mix of reaction time based skills and hand eye and hand foot coordination. Overall it's pretty complicated.
Writing this I'm realising the final "Turing" test for AI might actually be just replacing the average Taxi driver. Can it drive a car, choose a route dynamically based on day and traffic and weather, and have a conversation with a wide variety of people and topics all at the same time ?
e.g with the potent use of marijuana that's present these days, excess drinking & lack of reading + dumbing down of population via use of llms.
When driving I either now the way or use maps, there is rarely any guesswork or active thinking involved, maybe running is helping but even there I sometimes run routes navigated by watch.
Adjusting for educational attainment is an intriguing choice. If higher educational attainment were to decrease risk of Alzheimer's disease, wouldn't this adjustment optimise out the factor that they're looking for?
Otherwise very interesting results and conclusions. Also what's up with the outlying occupation on the left side of the 1st 2 charts on page 3: "Personal care and service workers, all other" with a mean age of death of 50.65?
The opposite of this is how sleep and unconsciousness allows the brain to perform cerebrospinal fluid transfer based maintenance routines via the glymphatic system, and why sleep is important to neural health.
https://www.science.org/content/article/scientists-uncover-h...
For example, airline pilots do not have a reduced level of alzheimers deaths, and that _certainly_ is not a place where you can coast with dementia.
And taxi drivers have _increasing_ anti-Alzheimer signals - with time, the areas that are known to diminish grow _more_.
Those jobs rely on navigation, not maps. Reading maps and navigating the real world are very, very different things.
The later point about zip codes with higher complexity is the same - these residents have to _navigate_ in more complex situations. How the author seems to be conflating that their personal job of staring at maps therefore protects them from Alheimers is very wishful thinking IMO.
Based on this data, I wouldn't be surprised if Google Maps has lead to a rise of Alzheimers.
That's plenty of time to be a full blown alcoholic.
> 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
I would’ve thought the effects were more profound
Such a small number of outcomes matter because statistical precision depends on the number of relevant events. With only 10 Alzheimer’s deaths, even a small change in the count could substantially alter the estimated association.
Taxi drivers provided more robust data, with 171 Alzheimer’s deaths among 16,658 decedents, but death-certificate Alzheimer’s mortality may not reflect how often taxi drivers develop the disease. Differences in diagnosis or cause-of-death reporting across occupations could influence the observed association.
The large overall sample does not eliminate uncertainty in the much smaller occupational subgroups, particularly among ambulance drivers.
Nonetheless, this is an interesting study and merits further investigation.
> roughly 1 in 100 compared with 1 in 60
I guess the broad population also rarely dies of Alzheimer’s?
When in my car, I'm just dumbly following the map app. But on a bike, I'm still having to keep track of where I'm going and a route.
Second rule - Got edge case? Got headline!
Also video games in general are pretty derivative, so playing the same genre probably won't help much after a certain point. But playing different ones can be very helpful, I imagine (same with other mediums).
I mean, they should be. Games are for fun, not for work.
Every 60 seconds or so I'd be teleported to a fresh location in the maze and given an instruction like "find the green door". I have no idea how I did compared to the other participants, but I found the maze/task to be both difficult and not at all fun.
That said, the effects of video games on brain aging will become apparent in the coming decades.
So the study might be testing out people who have extremely good memories to begin with and might be less likely to suffer from Alzheimer’s genetically.
So I’m wondering if this would still be true if it was tested on taxi drivers in New York City.
But my other theory, if this is not true, is that because they are now seeing Alzheimer’s as being a problem of glucose transport , and Since using your memory uses energy in the brain, this would lower overall glucose in the brain and protect it from developing all Alzheimer’s.
Or maybe like I said before that these people who can pass these taxi driver test already have excellent glucose transport in the brain which enables them to memorize the streets of London so much easier.
If I go to a new place, say a gas station, there's a specific route I took to get there. There's smells and sounds and sights that will be specific to that time and place. I feel like that will generate a memory that's much grittier for the brain to hold on to, than one where I've digitally moved through a place. When I jump around a Quake map, I know where I'm going, but there's no wind in my face and I'm actually sat in a chair.
Sure there's sounds and sights in digital spaces, but they don't smell like anything and you're not actually touching anything but your mouse and keyboard. And the sights and sounds are less textured than real life - repeating assets, limited number of sounds etc. You're not gonna be surprised by a new birdcall, or a sudden burst of smell when the gas station guy opens the grill.
Knowing how important smell alone is to memory, I wonder if what's actually happening is that you're mentally engaged in a pretty narrow way when gaming, and that that's not really the best way for a brain to operate for long stretches of your life.
How do you know this is caused by gaming?
What the hell. I passed all the test for driving cabs in Stockholm, Sweden. I had to memorize 20 regions in the city. I wonder if this requirement applies to all taxi drivers, including Uber.
At least in the US, Uber and Lyft basically went around the taxi cartels. I'd assume that it wasn't easy for that to happen in Sweden though.
They got rid of the exam in 2021, now you only need an navigation device in the vehicle.
This kind of misdirection is not helpful to the research community, or encouraging politicians to fund effective projects. Everyone WANTS a quick lifestyle change and will latch onto these things, but this is a real biological disease that needs real molecular fixes. Sorry, it's just how it is.
This kind of misdirection is not helpful for educating people on changes they can make now to reduce their risk, rather than waiting for a silver bullet. Alzheimer's research is well-funded in the US as the octogenarians running our congress are personally invested in it.
How about promoting spatial awareness and reasoning exercises (which is the actual suggestion of the article)?
Studies like this are useful inasmuch as they help us understand a disease more fully. Not sure what you mean by "misdirection"; the study's methodology seems sound?