By HATIM SHARIF FOR THE CONVERSATION and ALEXA LARDIERI, US HEALTH EDITOR
Published: 17:37 BST, 13 August 2026 | Updated: 18:42 BST, 13 August 2026
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 US.
Researchers believe it comes down to their ability to navigate on the go and interpret maps, with experts positing all the mental work of real-time navigating while driving might be doing something good for the brain.
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, which affects 7 million Americans, out of 443 occupations.
After adjusting for age, sex, race, ethnicity and education, roughly one in 100 taxi and ambulance drivers died of Alzheimer’s disease, compared with one in 60 people overall.
This pattern did not extend to other driving jobs, however, leading researchers to conclude that the key to reducing the risk of Alzheimer’s was not driving itself but continuous real-time navigation: the constant work of locating yourself in space, tracking a destination and updating a mental map as conditions change.
Drivers whose jobs relied on fixed or predetermined routes, like bus drivers and aircraft pilots, didn’t seem to experience a similar advantage.
Researchers believe the association between navigation-heavy work and lower Alzheimer’s risk centers on the hippocampus, a part of the brain that governs memory and spatial navigation.
Alzheimer’s disease is a type of dementia that affects 7 million Americans
It’s one of the first brain regions that Alzheimer’s damages: Problems with spatial navigation and orientation are among the earliest signs of the disease, sometimes surfacing before obvious memory loss.
In one landmark 2000 study, neuroscientists compared the brains of licensed London taxi drivers with those of people who did not drive cabs.
Their findings provided the first evidence via structural imaging that regions of the adult brain can measurably change under sustained navigational demand.
To earn a license, London cab drivers must memorize more than 25,000 streets within a 6-mile radius of Charing Cross, a challenge known as 'The Knowledge' that takes three to four years.
