[HN Gopher] Positive association between altitude and suicide in...
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Positive association between altitude and suicide in U.S. counties
Author : KoftaBob
Score : 106 points
Date : 2023-08-14 13:23 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov)
| the_economist wrote:
| High altitude is also associated with longevity, reduced heart
| disease, and more efficient mitochondria.
| adamgordonbell wrote:
| Lower BMI as well.
|
| https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/12/05/thin-air/
| programmarchy wrote:
| 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.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| Most population centers in the US west are built on flat
| land. Think Salt Lake City, Denver, Albuquerque. Even
| relatively small (80k) Santa Fe, despite having a 5000'
| elevation gain on its northern edge, is itself almost
| entirely flat.
| inpdx wrote:
| 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)."
| [deleted]
| copperx wrote:
| There's also a lower incidence of cancer in the population
| living in high altitudes despite being exposed to more
| ultraviolet light.
|
| I believe the leading hypothesis is that the higher oxygen at
| lower altitudes causes more oxidation.
| FollowingTheDao wrote:
| This is why it is important to take genetics into account when
| looking at these studies.
|
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5460084/
|
| Not all of us were meant to live at higher altitudes.
| joadha wrote:
| Yeah, and that made me wonder whether survivorship bias could
| be at play. That is, populations at lower elevations see less
| opportunities for suicide due to individuals dying of things
| like heart disease, etc., before they have a chance to off
| themselves at a later age.
|
| But they do mention that they "[controlled] for percent of age
| >50 yr." Does that imply that, per county, they excluded high-
| elevation suicides that wouldn't have happened at lower
| elevations, using known mortality rates for common causes-of-
| death for age > 50 individuals?
|
| I'm sure the answer is in the paper somewhere, but I need to
| get back to work. :-)
| feiss wrote:
| [flagged]
| ketanmaheshwari wrote:
| HN, please shred my work to pieces while sipping coffee.
| h2odragon wrote:
| Thats _why_ there 's so few COBOL programmers left.
| dist-epoch wrote:
| They don't mention about temperature. Is it controlled for?
| Winter months are know to be "sadder" than summer months.
| sokoloff wrote:
| I'd expect that difference to be driven by sunlight amount
| rather than by temperature.
|
| Cold is easier to deal with than dark and gloomy when I go to
| work and dark and gloomy when I come home.
| philote wrote:
| I'm curious if they controlled for sunlight then. I'm in a
| mountainous area and many areas (like where my house is) have
| mountains blocking sunlight for multiple hours in a day.
| Couple that with being in a wooded area and even some summer
| days can feel dark and gloomy. But in my case, being
| surrounded by nature far outweighs the lack of light in terms
| of depression.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| People who live at altitude in the US western states,
| particularly in cities, generally have high levels of
| insolation.
| hx8 wrote:
| Is there a biological process that explains how high altitude
| impacts suicide rates, or are there social variables that aren't
| controlled for.
|
| This paper gets a lot of scrutiny, but it's been out for over a
| decade and hasn't been debunked or explained. I've been mulling
| over this one for awhile, and have had several conversations with
| reasonably informed individuals in related fields. There's a lot
| of theories, many of which are explored in the comment section
| here. If you strongly believe in a theory, I'd like to remind you
| that this is a line of inquiry that could have life saving
| implications.
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| There are a lot of biological processes that happen at
| altitude, but HN is a great place to get pilloried for speaking
| off the cuff about "hypotheses" of this sort.
| brigadier132 wrote:
| What's the correlation between altitude and the amount of
| sunlight in a day?
| mrosett wrote:
| In the US, I would assume generally positive. The mountain west
| gets more sun than the northeast or northwest.
| brigadier132 wrote:
| I would assume that higher altitudes would have more intense
| winters that then result in people staying indoors and
| isolated for longer periods of time?
|
| I would guess that altitude and longitude are not correlated
| globally (at least I don't know why they would be) but in the
| US I generally associate altitude with snow.
| [deleted]
| misja111 wrote:
| Countries like Finland and Iceland are consistently in the
| top 5 of happiest countries in the world. Of course that
| has many non-related reasons, but the effect of intense
| winters can't be too bad.
| giantg2 wrote:
| The definition of "happy" can vary greatly between
| countries. My understanding is that Finland's "happy" is
| more similar to the US's "content".
| crznp wrote:
| Finland and Iceland also have some of the highest suicide
| rates in Europe. It seems that the correlation between
| happiness (or well-being) and suicide is complex.
|
| Which makes sense: it can be isolating if everyone around
| you seems to be thriving and you aren't.
| pentamassiv wrote:
| 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.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| 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.
| fulltimeloser wrote:
| Related map of Italian data:
| https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Ff...
| paxys wrote:
| TL;DR - brain needs oxygen
| FollowingTheDao wrote:
| It is not about oxygen, it is about catecholamine depletion via
| a decrease in BH4
|
| https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/10.1089/ham.2015.29000.stg
| vasco wrote:
| 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.
| frud wrote:
| 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).
| marcosdumay wrote:
| 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.
| nabla9 wrote:
| Suicide is not like cancer vs. heart disease where one replaces
| another. Older people do slightly less suicides.
|
| Suicide rates are up in absolute sense.
| gonzo41 wrote:
| Eh it's all just Lies and Statistics. It's like how 'non
| drinkers' die earlier than those who lightly drink. But no one
| who reports it writes the next sentence to explain that, non
| drinkers include people who don't drink to manage chronic
| health conditions and thus skew things with their ill health
| making it seem like alcohol is required to be healthy.
|
| I suspect in the future death by choice, in a palliative
| setting may go up. Though with the current waves of
| deregulation, maybe we're headed for more industrial accidents.
|
| But as for the article. Places that are high up, are cold and
| isolated and people are social beings.
| joncrocks wrote:
| Also includes people that are/were alcoholics and so _now_
| don't drink.
| itsoktocry wrote:
| > _Also includes people that are /were alcoholics and so
| _now_ don't drink._
|
| Does it? Can you link to the study?
| itsoktocry wrote:
| > _But no one who reports it writes the next sentence to
| explain that, non drinkers include people who don 't drink to
| manage chronic health conditions and thus skew things with
| their ill health making it seem like alcohol is required to
| be healthy._
|
| Can you point to the study that makes this claim without
| controlling for other health issues? Otherwise, you're just
| making stuff up, which is worse than what you accuse the
| scientists of.
| SpaceLawnmower wrote:
| This study seems to be a pretty important one (cited by
| Harvard in a blog post about alcohol's effects on health).
| It doesn't necessarily go into preexisting health
| conditions beyond broad markers like BMI, smoking, and
| cancer history. It says one of the limitations of the study
| is that it doesn't account for socioeconomic status, which
| is probably correlated with general health (can't afford as
| much alcohol if you're poor and you age less healthily).
|
| https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/j
| o...
| wryoak wrote:
| Altitude as a proxy for isolation, perhaps
| FollowingTheDao wrote:
| It is so frustrating that people have such a hard time that our
| mood can be effected by anything other than emotional inputs.
|
| It has nothing to do with isolation, it has to to how living in
| a place that does not match our genetics effects us as
| biologically animals.
|
| This effect is revealing the fact that people ho were
| genetically adapted to live ate low altitudes should not live
| at high altitudes.
| scarmig wrote:
| > Controlling for... population density of each county,
| rhplus wrote:
| Perhaps there's some economic FOMO too. You can find coastal
| (sea level) town with the same population density and median
| incomes as mountain towns, but the former _feels_ much more
| connected and accessible than the later. Even a large city
| like Denver has a remoteness about it... it's either an 8+
| hour drive to the next big city or you have to fly. Compared
| to west coast, east coast, gulf coast cities and counties, it
| might as well be an island.
| lm28469 wrote:
| It's a very weak indicator, I'm living in the densest city I
| ever lived in and I have less social life than ever.
|
| Random 5 seconds search:
|
| https://academic.oup.com/innovateage/article/2/suppl_1/19/51.
| ..
|
| > Follow-up analyses showed there was a significant (p =
| .005) relationship between population density and isolation
| in Whites, Hispanics, and others, in that higher population
| density was associated with greater social isolation.
|
| In any case it's much more complex than "many people = no one
| feels alone"
|
| Also if you compare the "suicide by county" and "distance to
| nearest metro area" map there is a very nice overlap:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_in_the_United_States#/.
| ..
|
| https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/files/2018/02/.
| ..
| rcarr wrote:
| I'd say it's not necessarily isolation, but lack of
| opportunity. Presumably the higher up you are, the less
| transport links and settlements there are, so
| geographically you now have less opportunities within a
| commutable distance. When I say "opportunity" I mean it in
| a very general sense - it could be social opportunity,
| dating opportunity, work opportunity, hobby opportunity
| whatever. When you're deep in the hole of depression, by
| definition you have lost hope of things improving, which
| would indicate a dearth of opportunity or novel experiences
| that could change your mindset.
|
| I'd say that cities can feel extremely lonely, because you
| can see all these people all around you but you can't
| connect with any of them so you kind of feel disconnected
| or unwanted which heightens the feeling of loneliness.
| Wheres if you are in a rural location, you might be lonely
| for lack of people but feel that if you were to find some
| people that you would get on with them well. Tying this
| back to the original point, I think if you can take
| advantage of the huge variety of opportunities the city
| offers you can easily overcome "city loneliness" whereas
| "rural loneliness" is much harder to overcome - if you
| don't get on with the small set of people nearby or don't
| enjoy any of the small hobby groups available, you're shit
| out of luck in terms of social interaction and will have to
| either move, hope someone new moves nearby, attempt to
| start your own hobby club or get used to your own company.
| [deleted]
| porkbeer wrote:
| If you only look at gun deaths, and dont control for gun
| ownership, wtf is this study for?
| tetrep wrote:
| > Using a different methodology, a similar, strong positive
| correlation between altitude and suicide rates has recently been
| reported by Kim and colleagues, (2011) using all counties in the
| United States as well as all 233 counties in South Korea.
|
| I assumed culture was a large component to this, but I don't know
| enough about South Korea to compare its high altitude people to
| those of the US. Maybe it is something environmental?
| squokko wrote:
| I think mountain/hillbilly culture in the US is very much its own
| thing and cannot be understood by lowland Americans. Maybe people
| in Scotland / Afghanistan / etc. will understand it better.
| nonameiguess wrote:
| 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 Vegas, which is
| high altitude and high suicide, but obviously for unrelated
| reasons.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| > 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.
| evancox100 wrote:
| The appearance of figure 1 is due to the majority of counties
| being at / near sea level. Suppose we take as true that there
| is a direct link between altitude and some other phenomenon,
| for example rates of altitude sickness. If 90% of the counties
| are near sea level, with some variation, you would only see
| increased altitude sickness in the 10% highest counties. The
| graph would look similar to what you see here.
| chongli wrote:
| You could probably control for the Vegas issue by excluding
| suicides of non-residents, though I don't know if that
| information is tracked or not. If that information is not
| tracked then it's really useless!
| cozzyd wrote:
| gambling addiction is a problem for locals as well (perhaps
| more so).
| slowmovintarget wrote:
| Needs a [2011] tag.
| bwanab wrote:
| Mountains == isolation.
|
| I grew up in a mountainous region where the ridges separate the
| valleys. If your friend lived a mile away, it might take 20 miles
| of driving to get there because of the separation.
|
| I wonder if they've measured that people who are very isolated
| have more suicide?
| scoofy wrote:
| The problem is that there are low altitude mountains. The
| argument here is that the suicide rate of Denver or Park City
| should be higher than folks living in the isolated mountains of
| Maine or Oregon.
| rmellow wrote:
| Interesting correlation! This looks like variable omission.
|
| What happens if we control for distance to a body of water? I
| suspect that has a more direct impact on wellbeing.
| frogger8 wrote:
| I live in Utah and left the LDS / Mormon church in May. I am
| dating woman that, like most modern American woman, are open to
| having sex before marriage. It's not polite to kiss and tell but
| turns out being touched starved IMHO is a really shi77y way to
| live.
| FollowingTheDao wrote:
| 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 critically needed to make something called
| tetrahjydrobiopterin (BH4), and BH4 last at the center of the
| creation of all the catecholamines, like dopamine and serotonin,
| but also Nitric Oxide.
|
| https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Fig-1-Tetrahydrobiopteri...
|
| They make a drug called Kuvan which is a BH4 analogue but they
| only sell it in the EU because they want those of use with mental
| illness in the U.S. to suffer.
|
| But zinc will increase the activity of GCH1 and alleviate many of
| these issues for me.
|
| https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00062...
|
| It has nothing to do with low oxygen, but rather low
| catecholamines.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| On a related note, how do you feel about the WaPo headliner
| today about misappropriation of Sami remains for
| (anthropological, not even medical) "research"
|
| https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/interactive/2023/smit...
| FollowingTheDao wrote:
| Thanks for that. Makes me hate the how much humanity moved
| away from nature even more than I already did. They took our
| language and our spirituality so why not take our brains as
| well.
|
| Sometimes I wonder if my mental illness, and my utter disgust
| of capitalism, is from the legacy of trauma in my lineage.
|
| What is even more interesting is that my senior thesis paper
| was on a man named John Collier who was the head of the
| Indian Affairs Bureau in the early 1900's and really into
| eugenics. He wanted to ship Indigenous Americans all over the
| country so we could all get their genes and be more like
| them. Funny that wikipedia called him an "advocate"!
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Collier_(sociologist)
| rednerrus wrote:
| Is this related to being a slow metabolizer of catecholamines?
| watersb wrote:
| Wow!
|
| Any correlation with blood pressure regulation?
| FollowingTheDao wrote:
| Oh yes, for sure. Also immune regulation via NOS2.
| sigtstp wrote:
| Just to nitpick
|
| > strong positive correlation between altitude and suicide rate
| (r = 0.50, p < 0.001).
|
| 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
| itronitron wrote:
| 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.
| victor106 wrote:
| Why is elevation the independent variable?
| selectodude wrote:
| Because they're trying to see if the suicide rate _depends_
| on the altitude.
| cosmicvarion wrote:
| I haven't dug into their controls, but it seems to me that higher
| altitude may be associated with remoteness.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| Also altitude's correlation with climate.
| rconti wrote:
| I'd say Utah and Colorado probably have better climate due to
| their elevation. If they were at sea-level they would
| probably be insanely hot.
| irrational wrote:
| Are Denver and SLC considered remote? My own city is about at
| sea level, but by car the next closest cities are 3 hours to
| the north, 6 hours to the east, and 9 hours to the south. I'd
| say we are more remote, despite being at a much lower
| elevation.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Denver and SLC are reasonably big cities. If you need, for
| example, a big-city childrens' hospital, they have them.
|
| Then you start to drive out of town, and there is N O T H I N
| G. I mean, from SLC, there's Ogden and Provo, maybe Park
| City. From Denver, there's Colorado Springs and Fort Collins.
| Once you get past those, it's a _long_ way to the next
| anywhere.
|
| So are they isolated? Depends on how you define isolation.
| Does that particular kind of isolation affect depression
| and/or suicide? No clue.
| foogazi wrote:
| Maybe isolation would be another variable that correlates
| to extreme altitude regions
| irrational wrote:
| Then it would be interesting to compare those cities to my
| own. If you leave the metro area, there is basically
| nothing in any direction for many hundreds of miles. But
| our elevation is at sea level instead of elevated.
| dboreham wrote:
| I live in that "long way to anywhere" zone (a day's drive
| from both Salt Lake and Denver). Lots of suicide here
| (annual 41 deaths by suicide per 100,000 people).
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| I think he is equating remote and rural. Essentially, not as
| much human contact, more separation from the world, and lack
| of socialization.
| jandrewrogers wrote:
| The mountain West is the most highly urbanized part of the US.
| CydeWeys wrote:
| .
| nabla9 wrote:
| Nope.
| andsoitis wrote:
| From the article:
|
| _Increased altitude has recently been shown to have a
| protective association with certain medical illnesses, with
| apparent decreases in mortality among patients with end-stage
| renal disease receiving dialysis (Winkelmayer et al., 2009),
| coronary artery disease (Baibas et al., 2005; Faeh et al.,
| 2009), and stroke (Faeh et al., 2009). By contrast, increased
| altitude may enhance psychiatric disorders, such as panic
| attacks (Roth et al., 2002)._
|
| AND
|
| _Controlling for... population density of each county_
| hinkley wrote:
| Terrain also means more jumping opportunities, so you'd need to
| break down by cause.
| desertrider12 wrote:
| They said there's a clear pattern both for suicides in
| general and suicides by firearm.
| londons_explore wrote:
| They controlled for population density
| hwillis wrote:
| 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.
| SkyPuncher wrote:
| 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.
| WindyLakeReturn wrote:
| 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.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| Did they do a study in Colombia or Mexico?
| andsoitis wrote:
| From the headline: _in 2584 U.S. Counties_
| iraqmtpizza wrote:
| It doesn't study suicide as a phenomenon. It studies firearm
| suicide and does so without correcting for rates of firearm
| ownership. But for some reason they decided they needed to
| correct for race. Well, not race. Specifically percentage
| white.
| wlesieutre wrote:
| _> Similar findings were observed for both firearm-related
| suicides (59% of suicides) and nonfirearm-related suicides_
| nabla9 wrote:
| no.
|
| >Similar findings were observed for both firearm-related
| suicides (59% of suicides) and nonfirearm-related suicides.
| exclusiv wrote:
| 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 self-reliant people even if they take government
| subsidies. Don't need to work much to maintain their lifestyle.
| Would prefer to get a higher hourly rate, not to extrapolate to
| have a nice income, but to be able to work like 20% of the year,
| be paid in cash and also take government benefits. Which is
| likely also driven by the lack of steady jobs that provide
| healthcare to be fair. Idle time and lack of structure in their
| lives leading to higher drug and alcohol usage. Financial and
| health stress. Leading to higher suicide rates.
|
| Study mentions altitude itself and hypoxia and controlling for
| income. But one could have the same income in a lower altitude
| location and have MUCH better access to healthcare, quality of
| healthcare, and steadier/structured employment than the higher
| altitude people that take their life.
|
| As with most things, I think it's a combination of factors. And
| the altitude itself seems to be one of them. Not only from the
| study's stated hypoxia, but it's a lot harder to work at altitude
| just like it is in the desert with the heat. When people don't
| have steady jobs and schedules, they have idle time, and along
| with other pressures and stress, bad things happen.
| [deleted]
| nurumaik wrote:
| Related interesting read:
| https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2021/07/07/a-chemical-hunger-p...
|
| TLDR: Author researches obesity epidemic in US, finds out
| negative correlation between obesity and altitude and comes to a
| hypothesis that it may be due to possible higher concentration of
| lithium in the water in lower areas
|
| Wonder if this is also the reason in this case since lithium is
| an antidepressant
| eminence32 wrote:
| > 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?
| bannedbybros wrote:
| [dead]
| seltzered_ wrote:
| 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 culprit: altitude-induced oxygen
| depletion. [...] Renshaw believes that oxygen-poor air tampers
| with brain chemistry, leading to a drop in serotonin and an
| uptick in dopamine."
| newsclues wrote:
| 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
| depression, and aren't interesting in exploring the
| relationship with O2.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Your link from "yoga, meditation and walking" to oxygen
| availability is... to put it mildly, in need of extra
| support.
| snakeyjake wrote:
| Yoga and walking are both exercise. Any form of aerobic
| exercise will increase oxygen availability.
|
| Elite, and dedicated amateur, athletes will develop
| specific breathing routines to increase O2 availability in
| support of increasing their VO2 Max but even for sedentary
| (so, typical) adults practically any form of mindful
| breathing coupled with higher-than-typical physical
| exertion will increase oxygen availability.
|
| Their breathing routines not coincidentally almost always
| mirror some kind of yogic breathing technique.
|
| Yogic breathing in hypobaric environment: breathing
| exercising and its effect on hypobaric hypoxemia and heart
| rate at 3,650-m elevation
|
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8413908/
|
| Effects of Slow Deep Breathing at High Altitude on Oxygen
| Saturation, Pulmonary and Systemic Hemodynamics
|
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3495772/
|
| When you meditate or do yoga asanas (poses) with a focus on
| your pranayama (breathing) as a matter of routine for long
| enough you subconsciously start performing yogic breathing
| all of the time.
|
| Walking is just irrefutably, no-citation-needed, good for
| you.
| jraby3 wrote:
| I understood that rural air is significantly worse than urban
| due to all the pesticides.
| jskrablin wrote:
| I live in a rural area and air here is significantly better
| than smog filled and ozone enriched air in the city I used
| to live in. Not to mention the lack of winter fog that can
| linger around for weeks at times.
|
| And that's excluding the light and noise pollution that are
| inevitable in urban areas. Yeah, living in a rural area is
| pure hell.
| thephyber wrote:
| What do you believe Ozone is?!?
| jandrewrogers wrote:
| A fairly toxic allotrope of oxygen?
| callalex wrote:
| Deeply toxic to human lungs.
| thephyber wrote:
| Today I learned that ozone is typically found in the
| stratosphere (which I knew) but also at ground level due
| to chemical reactions.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| And if you own an air purifier, likely in your room!
| qwerasdf5 wrote:
| Many rural areas do not have farming.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Worse than urban air with auto pollution? I'd want to see a
| source for that...
| boesboes wrote:
| Yeah, ppl on the ring road of Amsterdam live 10 years
| shorter afaik, for instance
| Scoundreller wrote:
| Poor people live next to highways?
|
| Or when we build the highway, we don't raze the homes of
| the elite/wealthy/well-connected to do it, we do it in
| "bad neighbourhoods"
|
| Or indirect effects: factories move/build next to the new
| highway (ease of moving materials+density of
| employees+ease of commuting because of the highway),
| contaminating the neighbourhood.
| dgut wrote:
| Source? As a counter anecdote: Madrid, where most people
| live near traffic, has the highest life expectancy in the
| EU at 85.4 years.
| egman_ekki wrote:
| maybe there are other factors at play here; who knows how
| long would they live if they didn't live near traffic.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Urban/rural v suicide relationships are all over the place: h
| ttps://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01650..
| . sees opposite relationship in China and Australia, e.g.
| [deleted]
| thephyber wrote:
| I have lived in multiple cities and multiple exurbs, at sea
| level and at a ski resort town (7000+ ft above sea level).
|
| I would make these claims instead: - people
| at altitude spend more time indoors avoiding extreme weather
| caused by the altitude - o2 levels to the brain are
| not significantly different for people whose bodies have
| adjusted to the altitude already - people who live at
| altitude are more likely to be more active - cities in
| modern western countries are largely clean of major sources
| of air pollution (one of the few things NIMBYs are good at)
| - cities in developing countries (eg. Pakistan, India, China)
| are incredibly different - rural areas are largely
| clean of air pollution except in hotspots (eg. factories and
| mines) - your doctor likely doesn't do actual science
| ("explore relationships"), but rather just disseminates the
| evidence that others have already recorded - your
| doctor likely works in the USA where we pay fee for service.
| Maybe you should look at how single payer systems align
| healthy patient long term outcomes align with the single
| payer total costs.
| boringuser2 wrote:
| Is depression and suicide significantly positively correlated
| to asthma or other breathing disorders?
|
| Preferably low-grade to rule out gross pathology.
| bannedbybros wrote:
| Too bad that the chemical theory of depression is pseudo-
| science.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| 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
| 2005 Marines study that Renshaw cites, which only continued for
| 90 days.
|
| I should stress that I'm not doubting the statistics, just the
| proposed mechanism ("low oxygen air"). On the other hand,
| "varying ability to fully adapt to lower oxygen levels" seems
| more plausible.
| kulahan wrote:
| 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.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| 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. But because of the body 's adaptive
| mechanisms, it is possible for cellular O2 availability to
| remain (relatively) constant despite living in a depleted
| O2 environment.
|
| Your cells cannot measure environmental O2 levels - only
| what is available from the bloodstream. Ergo, if sufficient
| adaptation has taken place - and it may not have - then as
| far as the body is concerned, there is no depleted O2
| environment.
| kulahan wrote:
| >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 would your body know to respond?
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Renshaw appears to be suggesting/hypothesizing that there
| is some universal "low O2" effect that leads to higher
| rates of suicide.
|
| I'm saying that this seems unlikely, given that in fully
| adapted individuals, the cellular environment does not
| experience low O2.
|
| Of course, in non-fully adapted individuals (either
| because they are still adapting, or because
| genetic/physiological factors prevent it), this would not
| be the case.
|
| But that still says that there's no "general" low-O2
| mechanism that is affecting anyone who lives at altitude.
| It only suggests that there maybe a low-O2 mechanism that
| affects some individuals. Whether there is a correlation
| between suicide rates and altitude adaptation doesn't
| appear to be easily established.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| 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 ...
| mrguyorama wrote:
| 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 if oxygen levels are identical once you get to the
| blood stream, it can cause many changes further up the
| process.
|
| What mechanism could possibly cause this? The brain is
| getting all the oxygen it needs.
| kulahan wrote:
| >What mechanism could possibly cause this? The brain is
| getting all the oxygen it needs.
|
| I have no idea, but I was unaware this could only be
| caused by oxygen failing to reach the brain.
| RobRivera wrote:
| its called scientific rigor
| lp251 wrote:
| Did you ever fully acclimate? After 3 years at 6000 ft I
| still had lower blood oxygen than at sea level. (per apple
| watch, so take that with a grain of salt)
| scoofy wrote:
| Yea, we would only need a small percentage of folks unable
| to acclimate to create a significant correlation.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| Isn't Apple Watch and other blood oxygenation just
| measuring saturation (a relative measure)?
|
| Among other things, Acclimatization involves producing more
| blood-oxygen carrying capacity (or less if you go back to
| sea level), which is an absolute measure, not a relative
| one that the oximeters would pick up.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| I haven't measured my blood oxygen, alas.
|
| I've been here 4+ years now, and other than being 4 years
| older and just coming out of a sedentary 3 year period, I
| notice zero effects of living (and running, cycling,
| swimming, hiking) at altitude. Can't say any more than that
| really.
| refulgentis wrote:
| Hmmm, given that...it does seem to me the initial claim
| is likely to be true.
|
| I know you said that it has to vary between multiple
| individuals at altitude, but it's unclear to me why.
|
| Don't we just have to show some individuals don't ever
| get back up to the same blood oxygen levels?
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| Well, another comment here from a guy of Sammi ancestry
| notes potential polymorphism in GHC1 as possible (and
| likely) partial explanation.
|
| I would imagine that there are a variety of potential
| genetic differences that could generate a wide range of
| altitude-adaptation differences.
| webdoodle wrote:
| 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.
| jddj wrote:
| I think that warrants a citation
| JohnDeHope wrote:
| 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 "political leaders who
| I disapprove of are in fact lizard aliens" could link to
| whatever material supports or disproves it. It'd be nice
| too if we could categorize these things: disputed,
| hypothetical, scientifically studied but not
| independently verified, multiple independent validations,
| technologies rely on the fact that this works, etc. I
| dunno why your point made me think of that.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| It's not particularly good, but you could look at
| procon.org
|
| I think there are a few other similar sites.
| aorloff wrote:
| Its called reddit
| gregw134 wrote:
| Sounds like Snopes.com
| mrguyorama wrote:
| In the age of the internet, lack of knowledge about
| something is a choice. People who believe Obama is a
| lizard alien don't do so because they haven't seen the
| appropriate "educational" video, but because that's what
| confirms what they want to believe.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| What about people who do (or do not) believe that
| socialism is the future of America?
| imperio59 wrote:
| Except that whole chemical imbalance theory was thoroughly
| debunked earlier this year as not being the cause of
| depression, just a marketing gimmick used to sell more anti
| depressants by pharma companies...
|
| "The serotonin theory of depression has been one of the most
| influential and extensively researched biological theories of
| the origins of depression. Our study shows that this view is
| not supported by scientific evidence. It also calls into
| question the basis for the use of antidepressants."
|
| https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2022/jul/analysis-depression-prob...
| what-no-tests wrote:
| 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.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| >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 the
| first time in decades the other day, zero butterflies in my
| stomach, zero panic or anxiety, zero inappropriate fear.
| I'm likely only alive today BECAUSE of medication.
|
| The whole point behind how new medications are tested are
| that we often don't have a great understanding of HOW a
| medication works, but that doesn't matter, because it
| demonstrably works in some percentage of people, and for
| those that it doesn't work for, often another medication
| might.
|
| So, with zero respect because you are actively harming
| people, Fuck right off.
| copperx wrote:
| Thanks for saying that.
|
| Although I've resigned myself because I know that people
| will often not acknowledge and have empathy and
| understanding towards a condition if they haven't
| experienced it in their own skin.
|
| It's depressing, but it seems to be part of the human
| condition.
| ethanbond wrote:
| 1. A countervailing meta-analysis does not mean it's
| "debunked"
|
| 2. A theory being debunked does not mean it's "just a
| marketing gimmick"
|
| 3. The serotonin theory being debunked does not mean
| "chemical imbalance" is totally exonerated
|
| Great article though, thank you for sharing. Here's the paper
| itself for anyone interested (AFAICT it is oddly _not_ linked
| in the UCL article?):
| https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35854107/
| user_7832 wrote:
| From 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 anyone is
| wondering.
| lm28469 wrote:
| Which is dumb, what matters is the income of the person who
| commits suicide, not the median income of their county
| JimtheCoder wrote:
| Getting income data from specific people can be hard...
| lm28469 wrote:
| Harder than publishing bogus studies for sure
| cykotic wrote:
| We live in a world of imperfect knowledge. We look for
| patterns to try to determine cause/effect. The beginning
| process for this is to point out correlations and then
| further investigate. It's not possible to account for all
| variables when it comes to things like suicide. It is
| possible and worthwhile to try to study the phenomenon as
| best we can.
| lm28469 wrote:
| These thing end up on wikipedia and in dubious news sites
| as "Suicide is caused by high altitude", so yes it does
| matter a lot actually.
|
| It's poor science at best, if you can't control variables
| then the whole thing is next to useless, which happens a
| lot these days. At the end you have correlations, not
| causations
| cykotic wrote:
| If we did science as you seem to think it should be done
| then very little progress will be made. You should read
| up on the history of progress in neuroscience.
| Metaphorically speaking; when you walk into a dark room
| one has to reach out and try to make sense of things
| before stumbling upon where the lamp is.
| foxyv wrote:
| 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.
| cykotic wrote:
| 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 new information
| worthy of further investigation?
|
| It's sloppy thinking to say it's a bad paper without
| having studied the issue and the data.
| foxyv wrote:
| > 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.
| Tomte wrote:
| You never get causation from statistical procedures,
| regardless how well you control for variables.
|
| You'll always have to augment statistical _associations_
| with further knowledge of the world, so you can get to
| causes.
| foxyv wrote:
| This isn't too far off base. High levels of inequality lead
| to depression and anxiety. It isn't a great feeling to almost
| get hit by Maseratis every other day walking to the grocery
| store when you can barely afford the rice and beans you eat
| because your rent is 75% of your income.
| cykotic wrote:
| 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%2Ff.
| ..
| mjhay wrote:
| 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, they're all in close proximity.
| hunter2_ wrote:
| 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?
| cykotic wrote:
| That is certainly plausible and worth looking into.
| throwaway154 wrote:
| Completely tangental: Higher air pressure makes me feel happier.
| iraqmtpizza wrote:
| [flagged]
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Well it is a good thing you don't have your name on this
| comment.
| iraqmtpizza wrote:
| Good thing I didn't waste six months of my life writing a
| paper about "what if mountainous areas and lowland areas were
| equally white, how would the firearm suicide rates compare?
| we'll throw in some laughable speculation about sleep apnea
| and mood disturbances to spice it up"
|
| also, why isn't the headline "low altitude people more likely
| to die"
| andsoitis wrote:
| From the article: _Similar findings were observed for both
| firearm-related suicides (59% of suicides) and nonfirearm-
| related suicides._
| iraqmtpizza wrote:
| They literally corrected for whiteness. So we don't even know
| what the actual rate would be. Also, studying firearm and
| nonfirearm separately just screams bias. Why not
| pharmaceutical vs nonpharmaceutical?
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| oldstrangers wrote:
| Wonder if they've looked at Vitamin D considering there's an
| association with living at high-altitude and Vitamin D
| deficiency.
| kilroy123 wrote:
| That was my first thought as well.
| hinkley wrote:
| Latitude or altitude?
| forgetfreeman wrote:
| 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 poor with no
| obvious opportunities for social or economic advancement.
| CaptainNegative wrote:
| Why is this a bad case for using the median, which is normally
| pretty resilient to influence from outliers?
| wnoise wrote:
| Because the variance (or any other measure of spread) is a
| useful explanatory variable that is ignored and left on the
| floor. Switching from mean to median, while more "robust"
| doesn't actually capture something new, just something old
| slightly better.
| [deleted]
| danesparza wrote:
| I don't want to come of as flippant, but I'm genuinely curious:
| Is there a correlation to how many stories the person's residence
| has as well? If they live on a 3rd story of an apartment, is
| there a higher suicide rate than the first floor of an apartment?
| rmellow wrote:
| Surely the rate of successful defenestration is lower at the
| 3rd vs the 13th floor.
| smeej wrote:
| The percentage of time spent at home would vary too much from
| person to person anyway, whereas percentage of time spent in
| the _county_ of one 's home is much more homogenous.
| JimtheCoder wrote:
| Getting granular data like this on a large scale can be rather
| difficult.
|
| Even knowing things like where the final act was committed (at
| home, not at home, etc) would be super useful, but that data is
| hard to come by i'm sure, especially at scale.
| Symmetry wrote:
| Given that even a 1000 meter change in height above sea level
| only leads to a large but not huge change in suicide rates, I'd
| be very surprised if a 6 meter change in where you spend half
| the day would be statistically detectable.
| twobitshifter wrote:
| That's actually a really interesting field of study
| https://buildingtheskyline.org/highrise-living/
|
| High rises have their own associations with mental illness. I
| don't know if anyone has ever looked at pure altitude as
| possible effect.
| CrimsonCape wrote:
| High-rise depression is caused by the architectural design.
| Rental apartments in a high rise are for-profit, and 99.9% of
| the time a developer is maximizing the rentable amount of
| square footage and minimizing the amount of non-rentable
| square footage. This eliminates all common spaces that might
| foster inter-personal interaction and relationships with your
| neighbors.
|
| Anecdotally, a 1:5 relationship is about ideal, for every x5
| 700 square foot apartments, there should be 700 square feet
| of common space. Think 5 doors attached to one courtyard that
| itself is about the size of an apartment.
|
| From a for-profit point of view, this is a waste of
| construction cost.
| plamic wrote:
| ME: Current resident of Asheville NC (elevation 2,134'). current
| mood: depressed/agitated. suicide risk: low/medium-low.
| josu wrote:
| I'm completely detached from the world of academia. If I want to
| look at the raw data how can I obtain it?
| ForgottenPwd wrote:
| You contact the study author(s).
| knice wrote:
| Would higher altitude not correlate with colder, gray, gloomier
| (highly scientific term) winters?
| hx8 wrote:
| Colder, sure. If by gray/gloomier you mean cloud cover then I
| don't think so.
|
| Regardless, high altitude cities like Denver, Salt Lake City,
| Reno or Boise are neither particularly cold or cloudy when
| compared to other US cities.
| giantg2 wrote:
| We also have to consider that temperatures feel different at
| altitude (and the mountain west is generally very dry). A dry
| 20F at 10k' feels more like 40F at sea level on the East
| coast.
| twobitshifter wrote:
| Might be associated with worse air quality however. Denver is
| particularly bad in terms of ozone.
|
| "at high altitudes, atmospheric pressure is reduced, and
| oxygen is less available (commonly referred to as the air
| being "thinner"). This has a couple of effects on air quality
| for the people in the area. First, combustion engines perform
| less efficiently than they do at lower altitudes, causing an
| increase in emissions. Second, UV rays from the sun have a
| greater impact at high elevations, leading to an increase in
| photochemical smog, the result of airborne pollutants
| reacting with sunlight."
| https://www.aprilaire.com/blog/altitude-and-healthy-air-
| air-...
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