DESTINATION: BRAIN HEALTH

Finding the best route to beat Alzheimer's

- IAN TAYLOR

Is it possible to navigate your way to better brain health? That was the tantalising question raised by a recent study in the British Medical Journal, which found that being a taxi or ambulance driver may offer protection against dementia.

Researchers from Harvard University studied the working lives and causes of death in millions of Americans. After comparing some 400 occupations, they found that taxi and ambulance drivers were the least likely to die from Alzheimer's disease.

Being good at finding your way around might help you stick around longer. That's the theory, anyway. Bus drivers, for example, don't seem to have the same protection, possibly because they tend to drive the same routes.

"Our findings raise the possibility that frequent navigational and spatial processing tasks, as performed by taxi and ambulance drivers, might be associated with some protection against Alzheimer's disease," the authors wrote.

It's potentially a significant finding because dementia is a big killer. Between 2012 and 2021, nothing killed more people in the UK than dementia. According to Alzheimer's Research UK, in 2023 alone, 75,000 Brits succumbed to it.