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