What's the correlation between altitude and the amount of sunlight in a day?
Positive association between altitude and suicide in U.S. counties
31–40 of 211 posts
Re: Positive association between altitude and suicide in U.S. counties
#32Related map of Italian data: https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Ff...
Re: Positive association between altitude and suicide in U.S. counties
#33TL;DR – brain needs oxygen
Re: Positive association between altitude and suicide in U.S. counties
#34[flagged]
HN, please shred my work to pieces while sipping coffee.
Re: Positive association between altitude and suicide in U.S. counties
#35It'd be funny if it turned out to be that somehow it's safer to live at higher altitude meaning suicides rates would be proportionally higher since you die less of other things. It's something I've mused about in the past, if you extend technological advances long enough into the future, suicide rates would go up because there'd be less other things to die from due to advances in medicine and so on.
Re: Positive association between altitude and suicide in U.S. counties
#36I haven't dug into their controls, but it seems to me that higher altitude may be associated with remoteness.
They controlled for population density
That's not the same thing. A town in the middle of nowhere Appalachia is much more remote than sparse suburbs twenty miles from a city. Hell, you might find higher density in some remote towns than eg Farmville Iowa.
Plus, depending how you measure it, "population density" can be a nearly useless metric. County-level population density is spread widely over 3 orders of magnitude. The smallest county has 64 people and the largest has ten million.
Re: Positive association between altitude and suicide in U.S. counties
#37High altitude is also associated with longevity, reduced heart disease, and more efficient mitochondria.
They do say this:
"Despite a negative correlation (r = −0.31, p < 0.001) between county altitude and the all-cause mortality rate, there was a strong positive correlation (r = 0.50, p < 0.001) between altitude and suicide rate at the county level (Fig. 1)."
Re: Positive association between altitude and suicide in U.S. counties
#38[flagged]
Thats why there's so few COBOL programmers left.
Re: Positive association between altitude and suicide in U.S. counties
#39From the abstract: > Controlling for percent of age >50 yr, percent male, percent white, median household income, and population density of each county, the higher-altitude counties had significantly higher suicide rates than the lower-altitude counties. Similar findings were observed for both firearm-related suicides (59% of suicides) and nonfirearm-related suicides. So (median) income has been considered, in case a…
Which is dumb, what matters is the income of the person who commits suicide, not the median income of their county
Getting income data from specific people can be hard...