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Depression and suicide linked to air pollution in new global study

theguardian.com

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Re: Depression and suicide linked to air pollution in new global study

#151

Post by elhudy »

barney54 wrote: post #123
homulilly wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or, like, reduce air pollution since in addition to this possibility it's already known to cause asthma, lung cancer, and heart disease.

This is not true of asthma. Outdoor air quality in the United States has improved over time [1] and asthma rates has increased. [1] https://www.epa.gov/air-trends

Auto immune diseases as a whole have increased over just the past 30 years; I'd speculate asthma is a part of this.

It will be interesting to see the driving environmental causalities behind these autoimmune disease increases if pollution is not a key variable.

Re: Depression and suicide linked to air pollution in new global study

#152

Post by icandoit »

drderidder wrote: post #136

No doubt pollution will make you sick, but I'm inclined to think that depression has a lot to do with just living in an over-crowded, unattractive, big industrial city environment, having little contact with the natural world.

Suicide rates are higher in rural America than in urban America.

https://www.cdc.gov/ruralhealth/Suicide.html

Why imagine what is true when you can take a second and find out what is true? The truth is external to you, look for it. I don't want to be a jerk, but you have generated a hypothesis(great), why not test it against the facts available to you? Maybe you owe it to yourself.

According to this, it is also true of Germany:

https://ij-healthgeographics.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1...

Let me know if you have better data. (I am aware that Indian Reservation tilt the scales big time toward rural areas, but do not think that removing them as outliers changes the balance)

Re: Depression and suicide linked to air pollution in new global study

#153

Post by saagarjha »

insickness wrote: post #77
AstralStorm wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's time to hire someone to maybe break the filter somewhen for a duration. And hack the meter to report invalid data.

I've always thought it would be an interesting service where someone did this with medication/supplements. They sent you supplies of both the real and sugar pill meds for a certain duration and you recorded how you felt.

Generally, denying people access to healthcare in for the sake of experimentation is unethical.

Re: Depression and suicide linked to air pollution in new global study

#154

Post by icandoit »

dtwest wrote: post #135
barney54 wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not true of asthma. Outdoor air quality in the United States has improved over time [1] and asthma rates has increased. [1] https://www.epa.gov/air-trends

Anecdotally, I was diagnosed with asthma as a child and walked around with an inhaler for a few years. I liked it, it tasted funny and seemed like a cool gadget at the time. But I did not have asthma. And I'm convinced there's no way my parents would've been diagnosed with it 30 years ago with the minor symptoms I had. So perhaps the asthma numbers are influenced by an increased willingness to diagnose it. Just a tho…

The guys say that death by asthma (severe cases certainly) are gently falling, but it looks pretty flat to me.

https://www.cdc.gov/asthma/asthma_stats/asthma_underlying_de...

Do you have any intuition for how to identify an increased willingness to over-diagnose? It may be true, but how do we test this hypothesis?

Re: Depression and suicide linked to air pollution in new global study

#156

Post by nathancahill »

abstractbarista wrote: post #122
saagarjha wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And it is not a placebo effect. How do you know?

Try this: Start smoking a pack of cigs every day (evenly spaced out throughout the day, from dawn to dusk) for 3 months. Then, stop. Observe your lung function and comfort levels throughout the next 3 months. I am rather certain that you will feel a difference. :)

Yes. Recently moved to a high PM 2.5 area, running ionizers in the bedroom and the rest of the house improves things immensely. This is exactly how it feels.

Re: Depression and suicide linked to air pollution in new global study

#157

Post by throwawaylolx »

sooheon wrote: post #149
throwawaylolx wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Do you have personal experimental data to prove that eating handfuls of mud is likely to hurt your stomach? I do have evidence that eating mud is likely to hurt my stomach: the relevant body of literature showing that this is a likely event for the population I'm part of. In OP's case, however, considering that the relevant body of litetuare shows that placebos are very effective for improving sleep quality, I would…

> the relevant body of literature showing that this is a likely event for the population I'm part of Please link some examples, because I somehow doubt that you referenced them before forming an opinion. I think we all know eating lots of mud is a bad idea without referencing literature, let alone qualifiers about population groups. I'm curious if you've lived in any of these hyper-polluted cities. The health effects…

>Please link some examples, because I somehow doubt that you referenced them before forming an opinion.

That's because I assumed it was meant to be a hypothetical example--I don't actually have an opinion on the health effects of eating mud.

The point is that one claim is regarding the likelihood of X happening due to Y (in general), and the other claim is about the affirmation that X happened because of Y (in a specific case.) Likelihood is confirmed by scientific articles that employ statistical inference methods such as the ones you have been posting, while the other claim is undemonstrable by the scientific method, so it is commonly supported through further circumstantial/anecdotal evidence, which is what I assumed the other poster asked for.

Anyway, given that most of your comment is posting more scientific articles, we're probably arguing about different things.

Re: Depression and suicide linked to air pollution in new global study

#158

Post by icandoit »

vanderZwan wrote: post #114
homulilly wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or, like, reduce air pollution since in addition to this possibility it's already known to cause asthma, lung cancer, and heart disease.

This kind of gets into philosophical questions about what could still be considered a causal link. If the increased chance of depression is caused by significant reduction in quality of life which is caused by pollution, do we still say air pollution has a causal link with depression? I'm leaning towards yes because removing the air pollution will through multiple steps reduce depression/suicide in that case.

I feel that mere causation is sufficient to promote action. Waiting for causation feels like rationalizing laziness.

People don't wait to determine whether school district performance is caused by the staff or the selection effect of eager parents, they just move to good school districts.

Chase those good effects AND attempt to understand them. Understanding the mechanism is not necessary to select for good results.

(All ethics is utilitarian in effect. Kantians stop pretending.)

Re: Depression and suicide linked to air pollution in new global study

#159

Post by icandoit »

im3w1l wrote: post #150
sooheon wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which they've already done, many times. Here's one study where they either gave real or fake air purifiers to people in Shanghai and measured cardiopulmonary benefits of intervention: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26022815

Nice! But no mention of depression there.

Spousal death is a big cause of depression. Is that sufficient to convince you of a causal chain?

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4119479/

I wish I had as many advocates as the devil did.

Re: Depression and suicide linked to air pollution in new global study

#160

Post by frank2 »

vanderZwan wrote: post #114
homulilly wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or, like, reduce air pollution since in addition to this possibility it's already known to cause asthma, lung cancer, and heart disease.

This kind of gets into philosophical questions about what could still be considered a causal link. If the increased chance of depression is caused by significant reduction in quality of life which is caused by pollution, do we still say air pollution has a causal link with depression? I'm leaning towards yes because removing the air pollution will through multiple steps reduce depression/suicide in that case.

About 20 years ago our society gained a deep understanding of the notion of causality. (To learn more, search the web for "Judea Pearl".) According to the terminology standardized at that time, yes, if adding particulate pollution to the air makes it more likely that a person breathing that air is depressed, then that is a casual link or a cause-and-effect relationship. It might be the case however that polluting the air reduces the person's quality of life and that if it were possible to effect an identical reduction of quality of life without polluting the air, then polluting the air would have no further effect on the likelihood of depression. if that is the case, we say that quality of life "screens off" the effect of air pollution on depression.
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