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Positive association between altitude and suicide in U.S. counties

ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

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Re: Positive association between altitude and suicide in U.S. counties

#91

Post by pentamassiv »

mrosett wrote: post #53
brigadier132 wrote: post #31

What's the correlation between altitude and the amount of sunlight in a day?

In the US, I would assume generally positive. The mountain west gets more sun than the northeast or northwest.

I would say it depends or is negative. I don't live in the US but here in the german alps, most towns/cities are not on top of the mountain. They are wedged between the mountains. In my city that means the sun is setting at 1 pm in the winter because it gets blocked by mountains. I had no idea about this before moving here but I have to say it gets annoying. There is also a city close by that has the highest suicide rate in Germany. They get even less sun in the winter because the surrounding mountains are higher.

Re: Positive association between altitude and suicide in U.S. counties

#92

Post by SkyPuncher »

hwillis wrote: post #36
londons_explore wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

My wife's job took us to a small rural city. By population size and density, we weren't that small. The metro area was 60k+ people. However, we were a 3 hours drive from any major city.

To me this panned out in two ways:

* There really wasn't a lot to do outside a 10 mile radius. Anything worth doing was 1 to 2+ hours drive (often more). That meant nearly everything we did was in the small city we lived in.

* Travel was frustrating. We essentially had to pay a 3 hour driving tax on every trip we took.

In other words, despite living in a "suburban" density city (with some urban density areas), it was really how our city was positioned relative to other cities that determined it's feeling. It wasn't large enough to explore internally.

Re: Positive association between altitude and suicide in U.S. counties

#93

Post by bannedbybros »

eminence32 wrote: post #11

> This retrospective study examines 20 yr of county-specific mortality data from 1979 to 1998. I've only read the abstract (so I don't know if my question is answered somewhere in the full report), but does anyone have any insight about why newer data wasn't included in this study?

[dead]

Re: Positive association between altitude and suicide in U.S. counties

#94

Post by hunter2_ »

mjhay wrote: post #75
cykotic wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Higher median income places tend to have a fewer percentage of poor people. Probably some people assume poverty correlates to suicide rate. The authors did the best they could at making sense of the data they had. Here’s a map of suicide rate in Italy. Note the north has higher rate of suicide than the south. The north of Italy is much richer than the south. https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2F…

As someone else said, it's the inequality that matters. People don't die by suicide from being poor, they do it because of the low self-esteem poverty causes when you're around many people doing better than you. Many very poor countries have suicide rates much lower than the US. Mountain towns have about the biggest class dichotomy that I've seen anywhere between the wealthy and the "help." Unlike many other places,…

I assume that mainly comes down to attractions like ski resorts (an activity that thrives on altitude and money) pulling in rich tourists and, more recently than this study, remote employees. Curious to hear other contributing factors for mountain town issues. And on the flip side: what types of locations tend to have the most socioeconomic equality?

Re: Positive association between altitude and suicide in U.S. counties

#95

Post by programmarchy »

adamgordonbell wrote: post #64
the_economist wrote: post #24

High altitude is also associated with longevity, reduced heart disease, and more efficient mitochondria.

Lower BMI as well. https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/12/05/thin-air/

I'd wager a hidden factor is that slopes are more common in higher altitudes i.e. there are simply more hills and stairs one needs to navigate leading to incidental exercise.

Re: Positive association between altitude and suicide in U.S. counties

#96

Post by marcosdumay »

newsclues wrote: post #78
seltzered_ wrote: post #12

I recall seeing this article from 2014 referring to suicides in Utah ('utah paradox') and how neuroscientist Perry Renshaw was trying to link it to altitude: http://mic.com/articles/104096/there-s-a-suicide-epidemic-in... which links to another study from 2011: http://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/doi/abs/10.1176/appi.ajp.201... "Together, the stray statistics and stories about life out west tipped off Renshaw to a common…

This aligns with my similar theory (lack of O2 leads to depression) that was born from observations of yoga, meditation and walking all forced people to breath more air through breath work, exercises or going outside, lead to better mental health outcomes. I am going to assume that in urban vs rural areas that is a similar effect from air pollution. But all my doctors have been inclined to give me pills for depressio…

Your link from "yoga, meditation and walking" to oxygen availability is... to put it mildly, in need of extra support.

Re: Positive association between altitude and suicide in U.S. counties

#97

Post by jraby3 »

newsclues wrote: post #78
seltzered_ wrote: post #12

I recall seeing this article from 2014 referring to suicides in Utah ('utah paradox') and how neuroscientist Perry Renshaw was trying to link it to altitude: http://mic.com/articles/104096/there-s-a-suicide-epidemic-in... which links to another study from 2011: http://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/doi/abs/10.1176/appi.ajp.201... "Together, the stray statistics and stories about life out west tipped off Renshaw to a common…

This aligns with my similar theory (lack of O2 leads to depression) that was born from observations of yoga, meditation and walking all forced people to breath more air through breath work, exercises or going outside, lead to better mental health outcomes. I am going to assume that in urban vs rural areas that is a similar effect from air pollution. But all my doctors have been inclined to give me pills for depressio…

I understood that rural air is significantly worse than urban due to all the pesticides.

Re: Positive association between altitude and suicide in U.S. counties

#98

Post by renewiltord »

newsclues wrote: post #78
seltzered_ wrote: post #12

I recall seeing this article from 2014 referring to suicides in Utah ('utah paradox') and how neuroscientist Perry Renshaw was trying to link it to altitude: http://mic.com/articles/104096/there-s-a-suicide-epidemic-in... which links to another study from 2011: http://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/doi/abs/10.1176/appi.ajp.201... "Together, the stray statistics and stories about life out west tipped off Renshaw to a common…

This aligns with my similar theory (lack of O2 leads to depression) that was born from observations of yoga, meditation and walking all forced people to breath more air through breath work, exercises or going outside, lead to better mental health outcomes. I am going to assume that in urban vs rural areas that is a similar effect from air pollution. But all my doctors have been inclined to give me pills for depressio…

Urban/rural v suicide relationships are all over the place: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01650... sees opposite relationship in China and Australia, e.g.

Re: Positive association between altitude and suicide in U.S. counties

#99

Post by WindyLakeReturn »

londons_explore wrote: post #14
cosmicvarion wrote: post #4

I haven't dug into their controls, but it seems to me that higher altitude may be associated with remoteness.

They controlled for population density

Controlling for population density doesn't control for the impact of population density on the issue at hand, as these are two different factors which are related and which are named very similarly.

Consider this simplified example.

11 areas. 10 of these are isolated and have 10 people living in each area. The last area has 100,000 people living in it. Of those 10 areas, 9 have 0 incidents, and 1 has 1 incident. In the 100,000 area, there are 100 incidents.

Not controlling for the population: The populated area has 100 incidents, the isolated areas have an average of 0.1 incidents. A 1,000 times difference. Populated area is much more dangerous.

Well that's obviously the wrong way to look at the data, so lets account for population:

Isolated areas have a rate of 1 per 100 population, populated areas have a rate of 1 per 1,000 population. A 10 times difference, in the opposite direction. So now we have established a link between being isolated and have more incidents, but we don't know why.

We still haven't controlled for the impact of population density on incident rates. We need much more data to solve this, as with the given information the result would be "Isolated areas have 10 times the risk of incidents" and then controlling for that factor we would see no more trends in our data. If we added thousands of more areas with different levels of population, calculate the per capita rate of incidents in each population, and then create an analysis of how populate density relates to incident rates, we could then control for both factors. The catch is that this last step is more difficult without enough data and often researchers aren't able to isolate single individual items to control for because they correlate too strongly with other issues.

Re: Positive association between altitude and suicide in U.S. counties

#100

Post by marcosdumay »

frud wrote: post #48
vasco wrote: post #35

It'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.

I think they kept those factors separate. From the abstract: > Although there was a negative correlation between county altitude and all-cause mortality (r = −0.31, p < 0.001), there was a strong positive correlation between altitude and suicide rate (r = 0.50, p < 0.001).

That's not the GP's question. In fact, that reinforces the question.

To paraphrase the question: since total mortality must be exactly 100%, is the increase in suicides just an automatic and meaningless numeric compensation for the decrease in all-(health related)-cause mortality?

The answer to that is somewhere within their methodology on controlling for age. But I was unable to grasp the jargon on this one.

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