Asthma and Pollution Increase The Suicide Rate

Risk of suicide increases to reach people because of respiratory difficulties, even in the absence of psychological problems: unexpected discovery was made by the authors of two major epidemiological research, published recently in the American Journal of Psychiatry.

The two studies aimed at identifying the effects of air pollution and asthma, so that the disease itself and as a factor worsening ill health, in the first, entitled “Ambient Particulate Matter as a Risk Factor for Suicide ‘ , Changsoo Kim and his colleagues at Yonsei University Health System in Seoul, South Korea, examined the levels of air pollution in seven cities in South Korea, compared with growth of dust sediments and 4341 cases of suicide occurred during 2004. Increased levels of harmful pollutants and dust turned out to be associated with a 9% increase in suicides, but that percentage jumps to 19% for people affected by cardiovascular disease.

The second study (asthma mortality and Suicide in Young People: A 12-Year Follow-Up Study), conducted by Chian-Jue Kuo and colleagues at the National Health Research Institutes “in Taiwan, studied about detectable for the 12 years between asthma and suicide on a sample consisting of 163 000 high school students. It turned out that teenagers are affected by asthma had a double risk of committing suicide compared to their healthy peers and that this risk increases notably when the disease manifests itself in a severe form.