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Comment by vasco | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

Also includes people that are/were alcoholics and so _now_ don't drink.

>Also includes people that are/were alcoholics and so _now_ don't drink.

Does it? Can you link to the study?

>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.

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/jo...

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.

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