Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 211 posts

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

#121

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

pentamassiv wrote: post #91
mrosett wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The US is generally at significantly lower latitude than Germany and other mountainous areas in Europe. This means that for large parts of the high altitude areas, seasonal variation in day length is much less than in Europe.

Also, because urban environments in the US west are relatively new, they tend not be found "between mountains" in the same way that the centuries old cities across the Alps etc. are. The large population centers (Denver, Salt Lake City, Albuquerque) are built in large, open flat areas, and many of the midsize cities are not really surrounded by mountains in the way that equivalent European or other non-American cities often are.

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

#123

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

nonameiguess wrote: post #45

The figure 1 makes it look like an awful lot like there is no pattern at all for the vast majority of counties, and then the few with the very highest suicide rates are all very high altitude. They also mention this, but I'm not sure country is a great way to measure this. Death Valley and Mt Whitney, the lowest and highest altitude points in the contiguous states, are in the same county. Might also want to remove Ve…

> They also mention this, but I'm not sure country is a great way to measure this. Death Valley and Mt Whitney, the lowest and highest altitude points in the contiguous states, are in the same county.

Citing the exception to try to disprove the rule generally doesn't work out so well.

Most high-elevation counties in the US are situated in extremely large high elevation regions.

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

#124

Post by sigtstp »

Just to nitpick

> strong positive correlation between altitude and suicide rate (r = 0.50, p That is not strong. Put differently, altitude only explains 25% of the suicide rate. I know some fields have lower thresholds for what they consider strong, but still. An effect, sure, but I'd bet on this pointing to something else.

Not familiar with the demographics vs geography here, but how do typical high-altitude places look like in terms of society? They control for median household income and population density, but what about social attitudes? (are these places more rural? more traditionalist?), number of ways people can engage socially (say, cultural events, clubs, and so on), does their diet differ? etc etc.

Also, maybe putting the year (2011) in the title might be good. There may be more recent work / reviews.

EDIT: I forgot to mention diet

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

#125

Post by rednerrus »

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?

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

#126

Post by egman_ekki »

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.

maybe there are other factors at play here; who knows how long would they live if they didn't live near traffic.

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

#127

Post by itronitron »

sigtstp wrote: post #124

Just to nitpick > strong positive correlation between altitude and suicide rate (r = 0.50, p That is not strong. Put differently, altitude only explains 25% of the suicide rate. I know some fields have lower thresholds for what they consider strong, but still. An effect, sure, but I'd bet on this pointing to something else. Not familiar with the demographics vs geography here, but how do typical high-altitude places…

Here's another nitpick for you, Figure 1 is showing the independent variable (elevation) on the y-axis instead of the x-axis. And I don't know why they used a line plot instead of a proper histogram.

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

#128

Post by webdoodle »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #110
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…

For that to be true, you'd need to establish that blood oxygen levels differ significantly across altitude adapted individuals, and I don't believe that this is the case. Also, when I first moved from Philadelphia to a village in New Mexico at 6000', I remember reading that I should plan on a 3 phase adapative process that would take as much as 9 months to complete. This makes me give less weight to things like the 2…

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.

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

#129

Post by foxyv »

cykotic wrote: post #81
foxyv wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You may want to consider, how much that bogus science has set us back. How long have we removed tonsils, ate the food pyramid into Type 2 Diabetes, measured people's skulls for criminality, and convicted people on the results of polygraph tests? Bogus science can move us forward, but also backwards.

On the whole though you would agree progress has been made, right? In a world with imperfect knowledge you do the best you can with the information you have. The response to a paper ought not be, “This paper is bogus because they didn’t control for all variables.”. If the paper is bogus then give reasons for why this is the case. Was the statistical analysis wrong? Are there reasons why this can’t be true? Is this ne…

> This retrospective study used mortality data assembled by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Retrospective studies are fairly rife with poor science. They are heavily limited by the data collected and can be easily manipulated by changing different controlling factors. While I wouldn't describe the paper itself as bogus. The title certainly takes a lot of liberties.

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

#130

Post by victor106 »

itronitron wrote: post #127
sigtstp wrote: post #124

Just to nitpick > strong positive correlation between altitude and suicide rate (r = 0.50, p That is not strong. Put differently, altitude only explains 25% of the suicide rate. I know some fields have lower thresholds for what they consider strong, but still. An effect, sure, but I'd bet on this pointing to something else. Not familiar with the demographics vs geography here, but how do typical high-altitude places…

Here's another nitpick for you, Figure 1 is showing the independent variable (elevation) on the y-axis instead of the x-axis. And I don't know why they used a line plot instead of a proper histogram.

Why is elevation the independent variable?
Post reply on HN