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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

#201

Post by FollowingTheDao »

rednerrus wrote: post #125
FollowingTheDao wrote: post #67

Oh boy, this is a favorite topic of mine because I get psychosis over 7000 feet. And it is all about my genetics. I am a lowlander by heritage, a Sami from Finland, and I carry genetic changes in NOS1AP that lower my ability to make nitric oxide at altitude. But the other factor is polymorphisms in GCH1, a gene linked to altitude adaptation: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5460084/ See GCH1 is the enzyme…

Is this related to being a slow metabolizer of catecholamines?

No. That would actually help.

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

#202

Post by new6392689 »

mrguyorama wrote: post #179
what-no-tests wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

THIS needs to be spread around much more broadly. [UPDATE]: Looks like I'm getting downvoted by people who cling to their meds. Try physical activity and adjusting your self-talk. Try having goals and making steady progress toward them. What you need doesn't come from a pill, it comes from living life.

>What you need doesn't come from a pill, it comes from living life. Fuck off. Imagine telling someone with astigmatism that they don't need a physical modification and augmentation to their bodies, but rather "to live life", whatever that means. Meanwhile, after decades of swearing I didn't need a pill, I didn't want a pill to "change" me, etc, I got on pills, and my life actually works. I rode a rollercoaster for th…

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

#203

Post by nullc »

mrguyorama wrote: post #175
kulahan wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you need to show that? I don't see anything that requires blood oxygen levels to be significantly different to get from "people at high elevation have access to less oxygen" to "living in lower-oxygen environments creates the right conditions to see serotonin go down and dopamine go up". Even if oxygen levels are identical once you get to the blood stream, it can cause many changes further up the process.

You are missing the fact that the human lungs are something like twice as effective and powerful as the "need" to be at sea level, and have plenty of room to handle less oxygen in the air. Second, the human body adapts quite well to living at higher altitudes, because it will compensate for the lower oxygen levels. Same blood oxygen level as a sea level human means same quantity of oxygen getting to the brain. >Even…

> missing the fact that the human lungs are something like twice as effective and powerful as the "need" to be at sea level

on average, but you can get a population effect from "some small portion of the population has smaller or disease compromised lungs or just sleep apnea, and THOSE people commit suicide at a higher rate at high altitude".

The "our lungs are big enough" only works if you control for the cases where they aren't.

I'd hoped that things like genetic screening would uncover that some cases where studies showing that eating/avoiding Foo has a small positive or negative effect turns out to actually be an enormous effect in a small sub-population... but so far we don't appear to have identified too many of those.

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

#205

Post by TheGigaChad »

exclusiv wrote: post #173

Anecdotally, I've found mountain people to be much crazier than normal. The desert has high drug use and has crazies, but even desert people acknowledge the mountain people are more unpredictable and unhinged. This may or may not be fair, I don't know, but from my experience, if I'm to theorize a generalization in conjunction with this study: Poor education. Lack of steady jobs. Low ambition. They consider themselves…

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

#206

Post by cellis »

JohnDeHope wrote: post #150
jddj wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that warrants a citation

This makes me think. What if there was a database of conjectures. Each has an id number. The database could link to all sorts of media, scientific studies, etc. supporting or disputing each conjecture. Then you could just give the id number and folks would also get all the pro and con material they might like. Even things like "the earth is a sphere" could link to educational videos and whatnot. And even things like…

In a way, what you’ve described sounds an awful lot like the transformer architecture…

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

#207

Post by mapmap »

dgut wrote: post #119
boesboes wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, ppl on the ring road of Amsterdam live 10 years shorter afaik, for instance

Source? As a counter anecdote: Madrid, where most people live near traffic, has the highest life expectancy in the EU at 85.4 years.

What are they doing differently to get this average?

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

#208

Post by kulahan »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #185
kulahan wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Ergo, if sufficient adaptation has taken place - and it may not have This tiny little caveat is the entire point of my comment. Happy to converse about other stuff, but it's a tangential topic at best. >You'd need to show it because for O2 levels to matter, it would need to be the O2 levels experienced by cells that are different. Right, and some of your body's cells are experiencing it differently. How... else woul…

Suppose you had an internal combustion engine that functions well in 20.9% O2, but very poorly in 19.2% O2. Then a mechanic shows up a lever you can pull that alters the way the engine intakes and processes O2. You move it a bit, and all of a sudden, the engine now functions just as well in 19.2% O2 as 20.9% O2. Now imagine that the engine can measure its own performance, and can move the lever itself ...

This implies that it has some type of sensor which determines if it's at 20.9% or 19.2% in some manner. Those are analogous to whichever cells are experiencing the world differently, so that the lever knows to move.

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

#209

Post by webdoodle »

jddj wrote: post #143
webdoodle wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. Low oxygen just doesn't make sense. It's more likely the higher cosmic rays and other space weather, which are already known to cause suicidal thoughts, as well as other mental health problems.

I think that warrants a citation

https://biomedres.us/pdfs/BJSTR.MS.ID.003709.pdf

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

#210

Post by incangold »

forgetfreeman wrote: post #147

Median household income seems like a pretty bullshit metric when talking about parts of the country where it's not uncommon for multi-million dollar ridgetop mansions to coexist with gross poverty. All of the high elevation country I've visited (disregarding obvious outliers like Denver and the front range) had a few things in common: very wealthy people enjoyed having homes there and the rest of the locals were dirt…

This is so important and I notice studies missing it all the time.

Tragedy and desperation mostly kick in at the bottom of the distribution, especially in the US where median income is in most places not completely awful.

So controlling for the bottom 20th percentile or something makes way more sense.

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