Category: suicide

US suicide rate has risen sharply among middle-aged white men and women

On By A.P.In brain, Eric Caine, Human Behavior, Kebmodee, mental health, mental illness, Michigan Department of Community Health, Pat Smith, Science, suicide, The Brain, University of RochesterLeave a comment

suicide

The suicide rate among middle-aged Americans climbed a startling 28 percent in a decade, a period that included the recession and the mortgage crisis, the government reported Thursday. The trend was most pronounced among white men and women in that age group. Their suicide rate jumped 40 percent between 1999 and 2010. But the rates in younger and older people held steady. And there was little change among middle-aged blacks, Hispanics and most other racial and ethnic groups, the report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found.

Why did so many middle-aged whites — that is, those who are 35 to 64 years old — take their own lives?

One theory suggests the recession caused more emotional trauma in whites, who tend not to have the same kind of church support and extended families that blacks and Hispanics do.

The economy was in recession from the end of 2007 until mid-2009. Even well afterward, polls showed most Americans remained worried about weak hiring, a depressed housing market and other problems.

Pat Smith, violence-prevention program coordinator for the Michigan Department of Community Health, said the recession — which hit manufacturing-heavy states particularly hard — may have pushed already-troubled people over the brink. Being unable to find a job or settling for one with lower pay or prestige could add “that final weight to a whole chain of events,” she said.

Another theory notes that white baby boomers have always had higher rates of depression and suicide, and that has held true as they’ve hit middle age. During the 11-year period studied, suicide went from the eighth leading cause of death among middle-aged Americans to the fourth, behind cancer, heart disease and accidents.

“Some of us think we’re facing an upsurge as this generation moves into later life,” said Dr. Eric Caine, a suicide researcher at the University of Rochester.

One more possible contributor is the growing sale and abuse of prescription painkillers over the past decade. Some people commit suicide by overdose. In other cases, abuse of the drugs helps put people in a frame of mind to attempt suicide by other means, said Thomas Simon, one of the authors of the CDC report, which was based on death certificates.

People ages 35 to 64 account for about 57 percent of suicides in the U.S.

The report contained surprising information about how middle-aged people kill themselves: During the period studied, hangings overtook drug overdoses in that age group, becoming the No. 2 manner of suicide. But guns remained far in the lead and were the instrument of death in nearly half of all suicides among the middle-aged in 2010.

The CDC does not collect gun ownership statistics and did not look at the relationship between suicide rates and the prevalence of firearms.

For the entire U.S. population, there were 38,350 suicides in 2010, making it the nation’s 10th leading cause of death, the CDC said. The overall national suicide rate climbed from 12 suicides per 100,000 people in 1999 to 14 per 100,000 in 2010. That was a 15 percent increase.

For the middle-aged, the rate jumped from about 14 per 100,000 to nearly 18 — a 28 percent increase. Among whites in that age group, it spiked from about 16 to 22.

Suicide prevention efforts have tended to concentrate on teenagers and the elderly, but research over the past several years has begun to focus on the middle-aged. The new CDC report is being called the first to show how the trend is playing out nationally and to look in depth at the racial and geographic breakdown.

Thirty-nine out of 50 states registered a statistically significant increase in suicide rates among the middle-aged. The West and the South had the highest rates. It’s not clear why, but one factor may be cultural differences in willingness to seek help during tough times, Simon said.

Also, it may be more difficult to find counseling and mental health services in certain places, he added.

Suicides among middle-aged Native Americans and Alaska Natives climbed 65 percent, to 18.5 per 100,000. However, the overall numbers remain very small — 171 such deaths in 2010. And changes in small numbers can look unusually dramatic.

The CDC did not break out suicides of current and former military service members, a tragedy that has been getting increased attention. But a recent Department of Veterans Affairs report concluded that suicides among veterans have been relatively stable in the past decade and that veterans have been a shrinking percentage of suicides nationally.

Thanks to Kebmodee for bringing this to the attention of the It’s Interesting community.

http://bigstory.ap.org/article/us-suicide-rate-rose-sharply-among-middle-aged

Doubts about Johns Hopkins research have gone unanswered, scientist says

On By A.P.In Adam Marcus, antisocial personality, Crime, Daniel Yuan, Elise Feingold, Ferric C. Fang, fraud, Human Behavior, Ivan Oransky, Jef Boeke, Johns Hopkins University, Kebmodee, Laurel, Lynne Bernabei, Maryland, National Institutes of Health, National Taiwan University, Nature, Neuroscience, NIH, NIH funding, Pamela Meluh, Peter Whoriskey, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Retraction Watch, Science, scientific fraud, scientific misconduct, scientific retraction, suicide, Taiwan, The Brain, Yu-yi LinLeave a comment

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Daniel Yuan, pictured at his home in Laurel, raised doubts for years about the work of his colleagues in a Johns Hopkins medical research lab. “The denial that I am hearing from almost everyone in the group as a consensus is troubling to me,” he wrote in one e-mail. In December 2011, after 10 years at the lab, he was fired.

By Peter Whoriskey
The Washington Post Published: March 11
The numbers didn’t add up.

Over and over, Daniel Yuan, a medical doctor and statistician, couldn’t understand the results coming out of the lab, a prestigious facility at Johns Hopkins Medical School funded by millions from the National Institutes of Health.

He raised questions with the lab’s director. He reran the calculations on his own. He looked askance at the articles arising from the research, which were published in distinguished journals. He told his colleagues: This doesn’t make sense.

“At first, it was like, ‘Okay — but I don’t really see it,’ ” Yuan recalled. “Then it started to smell bad.”

His suspicions arose as reports of scientific misconduct have become more frequent and critics have questioned the willingness of universities, academic journals and the federal government, which pays for much of the work, to confront the problem.

Eventually, the Hopkins research, which focused on detecting interactions between genes, would win wide acclaim and, in a coup for the researchers, space in the pages of Nature, arguably the field’s most prestigious journal. The medical school even issued a news release when the article appeared last year: “Studies Linked To Better Understanding of Cancer Drugs.”

What very few readers of the Nature paper could know, however, was that behind the scenes, Yuan’s doubts seemed to be having profound effects.

In August, Yu-yi Lin, the lead author of the paper, was found dead in his new lab in Taiwan, a puncture mark in his left arm and empty vials of sedatives and muscle relaxants around him, according to local news accounts — an apparent suicide.

And within hours of this discovery, a note was sent from Lin’s e-mail account to Yuan. The e-mail, which Yuan saved, essentially blamed him for driving Lin to suicide. Yuan had written to Nature’s editors, saying that the paper’s results were overstated and that he found no evidence that the analyses described had actually been conducted. On the day of his death, Lin, 38, the father of three young daughters, was supposed to have finished writing a response to Yuan’s criticisms.

The subject line of the e-mail to Yuan, sent by an unknown person, said “your happy ending.”

“Yu-yi passed away this morning. Now you must be very satisfied with your success,” the e-mail said.

Yuan said he was shocked by the note, so much so that he began to shake.

But in the seven months since, he has wondered why no one — not the other investigators on the project, not the esteemed journal, not the federal government — has responded publicly to the problems he raised about the research.

The passions of scientific debate are probably not much different from those that drive achievement in other fields, so a tragic, even deadly dispute might not be surprising.

But science, creeping ahead experiment by experiment, paper by paper, depends also on institutions investigating errors and correcting them if need be, especially if they are made in its most respected journals.

If the apparent suicide and Yuan’s detailed complaints provoked second thoughts about the Nature paper, though, there were scant signs of it.

The journal initially showed interest in publishing Yuan’s criticism and told him that a correction was “probably” going to be written, according to e-mail rec­ords. That was almost six months ago. The paper has not been corrected.

The university had already fired Yuan in December 2011, after 10 years at the lab. He had been raising questions about the research for years. He was escorted from his desk by two security guards.

More recently, a few weeks after a Washington Post reporter began asking questions, a university spokeswoman said that a correction had been submitted to Nature and that it was under review.

“Your questions will be addressed with that publication,” a spokeswoman for the Hopkins medical school, Kim Hoppe, wrote in an e-mail.

Neither the journal nor the university would disclose the nature of the correction.

Hoppe declined an opportunity to have university personnel sit for interviews.

In the meantime, the paper has been cited 11 times by other published papers building on the findings.

It may be impossible for anyone from outside to know the extent of the problems in the Nature paper. But the incident comes amid a phenomenon that some call a “retraction epidemic.”

Last year, research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that the percentage of scientific articles retracted because of fraud had increased tenfold since 1975.

The same analysis reviewed more than 2,000 retracted biomedical papers and found that 67 percent of the retractions were attributable to misconduct, mainly fraud or suspected fraud.

“You have a lot of people who want to do the right thing, but they get in a position where their job is on the line or their funding will get cut, and they need to get a paper published,” said Ferric C. Fang, one of the authors of the analysis and a medical professor at the University of Washington. “Then they have this tempting thought: If only the data points would line up . . . ”

Fang said retractions may be rising because it is simply easier to cheat in an era of digital images, which can be easily manipulated. But he said the increase is caused at least in part by the growing competition for publication and for NIH grant money.

He noted that in the 1960s, about two out of three NIH grant requests were funded; today, the success rate for applicants for research funding is about one in five. At the same time, getting work published in the most esteemed journals, such as Nature, has become a “fetish” for some scientists, Fang said.

In one sense, the rise in retractions may mean that the scientific enterprise is working — bad work is being discovered and tossed out. But many observers note that universities and journals, while sometimes agreeable to admitting small mistakes, are at times loath to reveal that the essence of published work was simply wrong.

“The reader of scientific information is at the mercy of the scientific institution to investigate or not,” said Adam Marcus, who with Ivan Oransky founded the blog Retraction Watch in 2010. In this case, Marcus said, “if Hopkins doesn’t want to move, we may not find out what is happening for two or three years.”

The trouble is that a delayed response — or none at all — leaves other scientists to build upon shaky work. Fang said he has talked to researchers who have lost months by relying on results that proved impossible to reproduce.

Moreover, as Marcus and Oransky have noted, much of the research is funded by taxpayers. Yet when retractions are done, they are done quietly and “live in obscurity,” meaning taxpayers are unlikely to find out that their money may have been wasted.

Johns Hopkins University typically receives more than $600 million a year from NIH, according to NIH figures.

For someone who has taken on a battle with Johns Hopkins and Nature, Yuan is strikingly soft-spoken.

He grew up in Gainesville, Fla., and attended MIT and then medical school at Johns Hopkins. He worked briefly as a pediatrician and an assistant professor of pediatrics before deciding that he preferred pure research. He has a wife and two kids and is an accomplished violinist.

In 2001, he joined the lab of Jef Boeke, a Hopkins professor of molecular biology and genetics. Boeke’s work on the yeast genome is, as academics put it, “highly cited” — that is, other papers have used some of his articles numerous times for support. Last year, he was named a member of the prestigious American Academy of Arts and Sci­ences.

The lab’s research focused on developing a methodology for finding evidence of genes interacting, primarily in the yeast genome and then in the human genome. Genetic interactions are prized because they yield insights into the traits of the genes involved.

During Yuan’s time there, the lab received millions in NIH funding, and according to internal e-mails, the people in the lab were under pressure to show results. Yuan felt the pressure, too, he says, but as the point person for analyzing the statistical data emerging from the experiments, he felt compelled to raise his concerns.

As far back as 2007, as the group was developing the methodology that would eventually form the basis of the Nature paper, Yuan wrote an anguished e-mail to another senior member of the lab, Pamela Meluh.

“I continue to be in a state of chronic alarm,” he wrote in August 2007. “The denial that I am hearing from almost everyone in the group as a consensus is troubling to me.”

Meluh quickly wrote back: “I have the same level of concern as you in terms of data quality, but I have less basis to think it can be better. . . . I’m always torn between addressing your and my own concerns and being ‘productive.’ ”

Then Boeke weighed in, telling Yuan that if he could improve the data analysis, he should, but that “the clock is ticking.”

“NIH has already given us way more time than we thought we needed and at some point we’ve got to suck it up and run with what we have,” Boeke wrote to Meluh and Yuan.

A few years later, another deadline was looming, and Elise Feingold, an NIH administrator, wanted to know what the lab had accomplished.

“I do need some kind of progress report on what you have been doing the past two years . . . and what you think you can accomplish with these funds,” she wrote to Boeke.

Citing Feingold’s message, ­Meluh wrote to Yuan, asking for help in explaining what the lab had produced. Its members had worked diligently, Yuan says, but hadn’t arrived at the kind of significant findings that generally produce scientific papers.

“I want to make it look like we’ve been busy despite lack of publications,” Meluh wrote.

Meluh did not respond to a request for an interview. Boeke referred questions to the university’s public relations team, which declined to comment further. An NIH official declined to comment.

While Yuan was growing increasingly skeptical of the lab’s methodology, Yu-yi Lin, who was also working at the lab, was trying to extend it. In the past, it had been applied to the yeast genome; Lin would extend it to the human genome — and this would become the basis of the Nature paper.

Lin, who was from Taiwan, was an up-and-comer. As a graduate student at Johns Hopkins just a few years before, he’d won an award for his work in cell metabolism and aging. He was also arranging for a prestigious spot at National Taiwan University.

At one point, when he was still at the Boeke lab at Hopkins, Lin asked Yuan to help analyze the data that would become the basis for the Nature paper, Yuan says. Yuan said he declined to get involved because he thought the methodology still had deep flaws.

Interactions between Lin and Yuan at the lab were few, Yuan said, and at any rate, Yuan had other things to worry about. He was slowly being forced out. He was demoted in 2011 from research associate to an entry-level position. A disagreement over whether Yuan should have asked Boeke if he wanted a byline on a paper erupted into further trouble, e-mail and other records show.

The Johns Hopkins spokeswoman, Hoppe, declined to discuss Yuan’s job termination.

On Dec. 15, 2011, Yuan was forced to leave the lab. He wasn’t allowed to make copies of his cell collection. He spent the next month trying to keep his mind busy. He read books about JavaScript and Photoshop, which he thought would enrich his research abilities. As he looked for other research jobs, he sensed that he had been blackballed.

Then, in February 2012, the Nature paper was published.

The research was a “profound achievement” that would “definitely be a great help to solve and to treat many severe diseases,” according to a news release from National Taiwan University, where Lin was now working.

Upon reading it, Yuan said, he was astonished that Lin had used what he considered a flawed method for finding genetic interactions. It had proved troublesome in the yeast genome, he thought. Could it have possibly been more reliable as it was extended to the human genome?

Lin, Boeke and their co-authors reported discovering 878 genetic interactions, or “hits.”

But Yuan, who was familiar with the data and the statistics, reanalyzed the data in the paper and concluded that there was essentially no evidence for any more than a handful of the 878 genetic interactions.

One of the key problems, Yuan wrote to the Nature editors, was that the numerical threshold the investigators used for determining when a hit had arisen was too low. This meant they would report far more hits than there actually were.

Yuan also calculated that, given the wide variability in the data and the relative precision required to find a true hit, it would have been impossible to arrive at any conclusions at all. By analogy, it would be like a pollster declaring a winner in an election when the margin of error was larger than the difference in the polling results.

“The overwhelming noise in the . . . data and the overstated strength of the genetic interactions together make it difficult to reconstruct any scientific process by which the authors could have inferred valid results from these data,” Yuan wrote to the editors of Nature in July.

His analysis attacks only the first portion of the paper; even if he is correct, the second part of the paper could be true.

Nevertheless, Yuan wanted Nature to publish his criticism, and following instructions from the journal, he forwarded his letter to Boeke and Lin, giving them two weeks to respond.

Just as the two weeks were to elapse, Boeke wrote to Nature asking for an extension of time — “a couple weeks or more” — to address Yuan’s criticism. Boeke explained that end-of-summer schedules and the multiple co-authors made it difficult to respond on time.

A day later, Lin was discovered dead in his office at National Taiwan University.

“Renowned scientist found dead, next to drug bottles,” the headline in the Taipei Times said.

Even in his death, the Nature paper was a kind of shorthand for Lin’s scientific success.

“A research team [Lin] led was featured in the scientific journal Nature in February for their discovery of the key mechanism for maintaining cell energy balance — believed to be linked to cellular aging and cancer,” the newspaper said.

If there was a suicide note, it has not been made public, and it is difficult to know what went through Lin’s mind at the end of his life. The apparent suicide and the e-mail to Yuan suggest only that Lin may have been distraught over the dispute; they do not prove that he acted improperly.

Shortly after the Nature paper appeared, Yuan hired lawyer Lynne Bernabei to challenge the way he was terminated at Hopkins.

In late August, Yuan asked the Nature editors again whether they would publish his criticism. Lin was dead, but Boeke and the others had had a month to respond, and Yuan hadn’t heard a thing.

On Sept. 28, a Nature editor informed Yuan by e-mail that the journal was still waiting on a fuller response from Boeke and that “experiments are being done and probably a Correction written.”

Such a correction has not appeared.

So as a last attempt, he figured he’d try the federal government, which paid for much of the research. But the government suggested that the threat to the federal research, if there was any, ended with Lin’s death.

“It is our understanding that these allegations are being investigated by Johns Hopkins University,” said the letter from the Office of Research Integrity.

Besides, it noted, the person responsible for the paper was Lin.

“Deceased respondents no longer pose a risk,” the letter said.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/doubts-about-johns-hopkins-research-have-gone-unanswered-scientist-says/2013/03/11/52822cba-7c84-11e2-82e8-61a46c2cde3d_story_4.html

Thanks to Kebmodee for bringing this to the attention of the It’s Interesting community.

45 year old deaf Belgian twins win right to die after going blind

On By A.P.In Belgium, Brussels University Hospital, euthanasia, Human Behavior, Putte, suicideLeave a comment

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The two men, 45, from the village of Putte, near the city of Mechelen outside Brussels, were both born deaf and sought euthanasia after finding that they would also soon go blind.

But their local hospital refused to end their lives by lethal injection because doctors there did not accept that the twins were suffering unbearable pain, the criteria for legal euthanasia under Belgian law.

“There is a law but that is clearly open to various interpretations. If any blind or deaf are allowed to euthanise, we are far from home. I do not think this was what the legislation meant by ‘unbearable suffering’,” doctors at the first hospital said.

Eventually the two brothers found doctors at Brussels University Hospital in Jette who accepted their argument that they were unable to bear the thought of not being able to see each other again.

The twin brothers had spent their entire lives together, sharing a flat and both working as cobblers.

Doctors “euthanised” the two men by lethal injection on December 14 last year and because the operation took place outside their local hospital each man was billed 180 euros for the cost of transporting their bodies home.

Neighbours and friends in the village of Putte said that the twins had to overcome strong resistance from their elderly parents to their demands for a mercy killing.

Dirk Verbessem, the older brother of Marc and Eddy, had defended the decision of his brothers to die.

“Many will wonder why my brothers have opted for euthanasia because there are plenty of deaf and blind that have a ‘normal’ life,” he said. “But my brothers trudged from one disease to another. They were really worn out.”

Mr Verbessem said his twin brothers were going blind with glaucoma and that Eddy had a deformed spine and had recently undergone heart surgery.

“The great fear that they would no longer be able to see, or hear, each other and the family was for my brothers unbearable,” he said.

Professor Wim Distelmans, the doctor that took the decision to “euthanise” the twins has also defended the decision. “It is certain that the twins meet all the conditions for euthanasia,” he said.

Chris Gastmans, professor of medical ethics at the Catholic University of Leuven, has criticised the decision and has concerns over the wider implications for the welfare of disabled people.

“I will not enter the legal discussion but I am left with questions,” he said.

“Is this the only humane response that we can offer in such situations? I feel uncomfortable here as ethicist. Today it seems that euthanasia is the only right way to end life. And I think that’s not a good thing. In a society as wealthy as ours, we must find another, caring way to deal with human frailty.”

Under Belgian law, euthanasia is allowed if the person wishing to end his life is able to make their wishes clear and a doctor judges that he is suffering unbearable pain.

The case is unusual because neither of the men was terminally ill nor suffering physical pain.

Just days after the twins were killed by doctors, Belgium’s ruling Socialists tabled a new legal amendment that will allow the euthanasia of children and Alzheimer’s sufferers.

If passed later this year, the new law will allow euthanasia to be “extended to minors if they are capable of discernment or affected by an incurable illness or suffering that we cannot alleviate”.

In 2002, Belgium was the second country in the world after the Netherlands to legalise euthanasia in but it currently only applies to people over the age of 18.

Some 1,133 cases of euthanasia – mostly for terminal cancer – were recorded in 2011, according to the last official figures.

In 2011, it emerged that people killed by euthanasia in Belgium are having their organs harvested for transplant surgery.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/belgium/9800378/Belgian-twins-had-first-request-to-die-refused.html

Old termites blow themselves up to save the nest

On By A.P.In Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic in Prague, Boston, Boston University, Dr. Rajadhyaksha, exploding termite, French Guiana, James Traniello, Neocapritermes taracua termites, Northeastern University, Prague, Rebeca Rosengaus, Robert Hanus, Science, suicide, termiteLeave a comment

sn-termites

When trekking through a forest in French Guiana to study termites, a group of biologists noticed unique spots of blue on the backs of the insects in one nest. Curious, one scientist reached down to pick up one of these termites with a pair of forceps. It exploded. The blue spots, the team discovered, contain explosive crystals, and they’re found only on the backs of the oldest termites in the colony. The aged termites carry out suicide missions on behalf of their nest mates.

After their initial observation, the team carried out field studies of Neocapritermes taracua termites and discovered that those with the blue spots also exploded during encounters with other species of termites or larger predators. The researchers report online today in Science that the secretions released during the explosion killed or paralyzed opponents from a competing termite species. However, if the scientists removed the blue crystal from the termites, their secretions were no longer toxic.

Back in their labs, scientists led by biochemist Robert Hanus of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic in Prague went on to show that the blue termites always had shorter, worn-down mandibles than others from the same species, indicating that they were older. Then, the researchers removed the contents of the blue pouches and analyzed them. They contained a novel protein that is unusually rich with copper, suggesting that it’s an oxygen binding-protein. Rather than being toxic itself, it likely is an enzyme that converts a nontoxic protein into something toxic.

“What happens is when the termites explode, the contents of the back pouch actually interact with secretions from the salivary gland and the mixture is what is toxic,” explains Hanus. It’s the first time two interacting chemicals have been shown responsible for a defense mechanism in termites, he says.

Researchers already knew that many social insects change roles in their colony as they age. Moreover, it’s well known that a number of species of termites explode, often oozing sticky or smelly fluid onto their opponent. But in previously observed cases, the explosive or noxious material is found in the termites’ heads, and the suicide missions are the responsibility of a distinct caste of soldier termites, not aging workers. Since N. taracua have soldiers, it’s especially surprising to see workers exploding, says Hanus.

“This is a quirky, funny natural history,” says behavioral ecologist Rebeca Rosengaus of Northeastern University in Boston, who was not involved in the study. “What’s new and interesting here is that this is found to be an aspect of colony-related age organization,” says biologist James Traniello of Boston University. And the placement and chemistry of the blue crystals is unique, he says. The findings illustrate the vast diversity of social structures and defense mechanisms that the more than 3000 species of termites have evolved over time, Traniello says.

One question that remains is exactly how aging triggers the accumulation of the blue crystals. “We’re still not 100% sure what the role of the blue protein is,” says Hanus. “That’s definitely something which we want to perform further research on.”

http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2012/07/old-termites-blow-themselves-up-.html

Thanks to Dr. Rajadhyaksha for bringing this to the attention of the It’s Interesting community.

Mass squid suicides in California

On By A.P.In Alaska, calcium, domoic acid, Dosidicus gigas, El Niño, glutamate, Gulf of Mexico, Hannah Rosen, Humboldt squid, lantern fish, marine biology, Monterey Bay, potassium, Science, squid, suicide, William GillyLeave a comment

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Thousands of jumbo squid have recently beached themselves on central California shores, committing mass “suicide.” But despite decades of study into the phenomenon in which the squid essentially fling themselves onto shore, the cause of these mass beachings have been a mystery.

But a few intriguing clues suggest poisonous algae that form so-called red tides may be intoxicating the Humboldt squid and causing the disoriented animals to swim ashore in Monterey Bay, said William Gilly, a marine biologist at Stanford University’s Hopkins Marine Station in Pacific Grove, Calif.

Each of the strandings has corresponded to a red tide, in which algae bloom and release an extremely potent brain toxin, Gilly said. This fall, the red tides have occurred every three weeks, around the same time as the squid beachings, he said. (The squid have been stranding in large numbers for years, with no known cause.)

For decades, beach lovers have reported bizarre mass strandings where throngs of Humboldt squid (Dosidicus gigas), also called jumbo squid, fling themselves ashore, said Hannah Rosen, a marine biology doctoral candidate at the Hopkins Marine Station.

“For some reason they just start swimming for the beach,” Rosen told LiveScience. “They’ll asphyxiate because they’re out of the water too long. People have tried to throw them back in the water, and a lot of times the squid will just head right back for the beach.”

Before this, scientists in 2002 and 2006 noticed mass squid strandings from the Gulf of Mexico all the way to Alaska, Gilly said.

But the cause of the mass squid deaths was an enigma. The strandings seem to happen whenever schools of squid invade new territory, leading some to suggest the creatures simply get lost and don’t realize they are out of the water until it is too late. The squid washing ashore are juvenile size, about 1 foot (0.3 meters) long, and hadn’t been traveled to Monterey Bay before this fall. This season’s stranding, which started Oct. 9, happened around the time Humboldt squid entered the bay.

Other scientists have proposed that red tides that release a lethal toxin called domoic acid may be intoxicating the squid and disorienting them. But when researchers tested the stranded squid for domoic acid, they found only trace amounts of the chemical, Gilly said.

The poisonous chemical mimics a brain chemical called glutamate in mammals, though domoic acid is 10,000 times more potent than glutamate. The similar structure means domoic acid can bind to glutamate receptors on neurons. In turn, the receptor opens channels that let calcium into the cell. At high levels the poison causes brain cells to go haywire and fire like crazy, so much that they fill up with calcium, burst and die, Gilly said. [10 Weird Facts About the Brain]

Humans who eat shellfish contaminated with this red-tide toxin get amnesic shellfish poisoning, because the toxin destroys their brain’s memory center called the hippocampus. Sea lions that eat similarly poisoned anchovies or krill go into seizures or become disoriented and behave bizarrely.

However, no one has tested the effects of lower levels of the chemical on squid.

Potential cause?

But new evidence points to the red tide as at least one cause of the mass strandings. While most sea life follows daily tidal or lunar cycles, the mass deaths seem to be happening every three weeks. That led one of Gilly’s graduate students, R. Russell Williams, to see if something in the environment was leading them astray.

“He was fixated in finding some kind of environmental signal,” Gilly said.

Russell found that red tides occurred every three weeks, around the same time as the squid strandings, suggesting a link, Gilly said.

While past researchers have only found trace levels of the toxic red-tide chemical in stranded squid, low doses of domoic could essentially be making the squid drunk. Combined with navigating unfamiliar waters, that could cause the mass die-offs.

“They could be tipped over the edge by something like domoic acid that might cloud their judgment,” Gilly said.

This isn’t the first time Gilly and his colleagues have been led on a CSI-like hunt for Humboldt squid. In 2011, they figured out why the elusive jumbo squid left their usual feeding grounds off the Baja California coast in the winter of 2009 to 2010. Apparently, the squid had moved north, following their prey, small, bioluminescent fish called lantern fish, which had also moved north due to El Niño weather patterns.

http://www.livescience.com/25550-mass-squid-suicide.html

Former Beatle Paul McCartney will fill in for Kurt Cobain in Nirvana reunion

On By A.P.In 12-12-12, bipolar disorder, Bruce Springsteen, Concert for Sandy Relief, Dave Grohl, Eric Clapton, grunge, Human Behavior, Krist Novoselic, Kurt Cobain, music, Neuropsychiatric Disease, New York, Nirvana, Nirvana reunion, Paul McCartney, Sandy, suicide, Superstorm Sandy, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Who, UncategorizedLeave a comment

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70 year old Sir Paul McCartney filled in for Kurt Cobain as the surviving members of Nirvana reunited at the Superstorm Sandy benefit in New York on Wednesday.

Grunge stars Dave Grohl and bassist Krist Novoselic have reportedly enlisted the Beatle to play onstage with them at the Madison Square Garden charity gig.

The Fab Four legend reveals Grohl invited him to “jam with some mates”, but admits he had no idea he was filling in for tragic rocker Cobain, who committed suicide in 1994.

Sir Paul tells Britain’s The Sun, “I didn’t really know who they were. They are saying how good it is to be back together. I said, ‘Whoa? You guys haven’t played together for all that time? And somebody whispered to me, ‘That’s Nirvana. You’re Kurt.’ I couldn’t believe it.”

The Rolling Stones, Bruce Springsteen, The Who, and Eric Clapton were also on the bill for the 12-12-12 Concert for Sandy Relief.

http://www.torontosun.com/2012/12/12/paul-mccartney-to-fill-in-for-kurt-cobain-in-nirvana-reunion-gig

Research from Asia is overturning long-held notions about the factors that drive people to commit suicide

On By A.P.In American Journal of Psychiatry, Asia, Canada, Centre for Global Health Research, Cheng Hui, China, Depression, Emory University School of Medicine, Harvard Injury Control Research Center, Hong Kong Jockey Club Centre for Suicide Research and Prevention, Human Behavior, impulsivity, India, Japan, Jie Zhang, Kenneth Conner, mental illness, Michael Phillips, Million Death Study, Mrs. Y, Neuropsychiatric Disease, Paul Yip, Prabhat Jha, Psychiatry, schizophrenia, Science, Shanghai Mental Health Center, South Korea, State University of New York, strain theory, suicide, suicide risk factors, Thailand, The Lancet, Toronto, University of Hong Kong, University of Rochester Medical Center in New York, WHO, World Bank, World Bank's Global Burden of Disease Study, World Health OrganizationLeave a comment

 

SHANGHAI, CHINA—Mrs. Y’s death would have stumped many experts. A young mother and loyal wife, the rural Chinese woman showed none of the standard risk factors for suicide. She was not apparently depressed or mentally ill. Villagers said she exuded happiness and voiced few complaints. But when a neighbor publicly accused Mrs. Y of stealing eggs from her henhouse, the shame was unbearable. Mrs. Y rushed home and downed a bottle of pesticide. “A person cannot live without face,” she cried before she died. “I will die to prove that I did not steal her eggs.”

Decades of research in Western countries have positioned mental illness as an overwhelming predictor of suicide, figuring in more than 90% of such deaths. Another big risk factor is gender: Men commit suicide at much higher rates than women, by a ratio of nearly 4 to 1 in the United States, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Other common correlates include city life and divorce. But in China, says Jie Zhang, a sociologist at the State University of New York, Buffalo State, the case of Mrs. Y is “a very typical scenario.”

Zhang oversaw interviews with Mrs. Y’s family and acquaintances while researching the prevalence of mental illness among suicide victims aged 15 to 34 in rural China. Through psychological autopsies—detailed assessments after death—Zhang and coauthors found that only 48% of 392 victims had a mental illness, they reported in the July 2010 issue of the American Journal of Psychiatry. An earlier study of Chinese suicide victims put the prevalence of mental disorders at 63%—still nowhere near as high as accepted models of suicide prevention would predict. Meanwhile, other standard risk factors simply don’t hold true, or are even reversed, in China. Chinese women commit suicide at unusually high rates; rural residents kill themselves more frequently than city dwellers do; and marriage may make a person more, rather than less, volatile.

Such differences matter because China accounts for an estimated 22% of global suicides, or roughly 200,000 deaths every year. In India, meanwhile, some 187,000 people took their own lives in 2010—twice as many as died from HIV/AIDS. By comparison, the World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that suicides in high-income countries total only 140,000 a year. Suicide rates in Japan and South Korea, however, are similar to China’s (see p. 1026), suggesting that this is a regional public health issue. And yet suicide in Asia is poorly understood. “Suicide has not gotten the attention it deserves vis-à-vis its disease burden,” says Prabhat Jha, director of the Centre for Global Health Research in Toronto, Canada.

Emerging research from developing countries like China and India is now filling that gap—and overturning prevailing notions. “The focus of the study of suicide in the West is psychiatry,” Zhang says. While mental illness remains an important correlate in Asia, he says, researchers may learn more from a victim’s family, religion, education, and personality. New findings, Zhang says, suggest that some researchers may have misread correlation as causation: In both the East and the West, “mental illness might not be the real cause of suicide.”

Distressing data

Reliable data on suicide across Asia were once maddeningly scarce. In Thailand until 2003, there was no requirement that the reported cause of death be medically validated—a flaw that rendered the country’s suicide data inaccurate. In India, suicide is a crime, which means it often goes unreported. But the Thai government now has a more accurate reporting system for mortality figures, while Indian researchers are benefiting from the Million Death Study, an effort to catalog causes of death for 1 million Indians in a 16-year survey relying on interviews with family members (Science, 15 June, p. 1372). The study has already produced a disturbing revelation about reported suicide rates. “When we compare our data with police reports, you find undercounts of at least 25% in men and 36% in women,” says Jha, the study’s lead investigator.

New insights from China are particularly instructive. Because suicide carries a stigma, the Chinese government withheld data on the topic until the late 1980s. When information finally came out, it quickly became clear that the country had a serious problem. In 1990, for example, the World Bank’s Global Burden of Disease Study estimated there were 343,000 suicides in China—or 30 per 100,000 people. The U.S. rate for the same year was 12 per 100,000.

But other reports gave different figures, prompting a debate on sources. WHO’s extrapolated total was based on data that China had reported from stations covering only 10% of the population, skewed toward urban residents. As researchers focused on the problem, they arrived at more reliable figures—but also unearthed more mysteries. In an analysis in The Lancet in 2002, a group led by Michael Phillips of Shanghai Mental Health Center and Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta estimated that from 1995 to 1999, Chinese women killed themselves more frequently than men—by a ratio of 5 to 4. “There was originally disbelief about the very different gender ratio in China,” Phillips says, although later it was accepted.

Today, the suicide sex ratio in China is roughly 1 to 1, still a significant departure from the overall U.S. male-to-female ratio of 4 to 1. In India, the male-to-female suicide ratio is 1.5 to 1, although in the 15 to 29 age group it is close to equal. And yet, WHO estimates the global sex ratio at three men to one woman. (With colleague Cheng Hui, Phillips recently used Chinese and Indian figures to lower that estimate to 1.67 to 1.) Among young adults in India, suicide is second only to maternal mortality as a cause of death for women, according to the Million Death Survey.

In both China and India, cases like Mrs. Y’s involving no apparent mental illness are common. In India, suicide is most prevalent among teenagers and young adults—the cohort that is entering the workforce, marrying, and facing new life stresses. This contrasts with the Western pattern of high suicide rates among the middle-aged, suggesting that although “there might well be some underlying psychiatric conditions, the main drivers of [suicide in India] are probably chiefly social conditions,” Jha says. While cautioning that detailed psychological autopsies are still needed in India, he says, “it’s a reasonable assumption that many of these young folks are not mentally ill.”

Convincing researchers outside Asia may prove an uphill battle. Matthew Miller, a suicide researcher at the Harvard Injury Control Research Center in Boston, says that mental illness may be underdiagnosed in Asia for reasons that aren’t fully understood. That could throw off correlation studies. Phillips, who has worked in China for over 20 years, agrees that underdiagnosis is a problem, and that “many Western researchers still believe that we are just missing cases.” But he rejects that explanation. Even accounting for underdiagnosis, he says, the finding of a lower rate of mental illness among suicide victims has held up in multiple studies. Many Chinese suicide victims, he adds, are “most certainly severely distressed, but they don’t meet the criteria of a formal mental illness.”

Lethal weapons

Assuming that suicide risk is shaped by different factors in Asia, researchers are striving to uncover the roots. One clue may lie in the high proportion of unplanned Chinese suicides. In a 2002 survey of 306 Chinese patients who had been hospitalized for at least 6 hours following a suicide attempt, Phillips and colleagues found that 35% had contemplated suicide for less than 10 minutes—and 54% for less than 2 hours. Impulsiveness among suicide victims in Asia “tends to be higher than in the West,” says Paul Yip, director of the Hong Kong Jockey Club Centre for Suicide Research and Prevention at the University of Hong Kong and one of the authors of a recent WHO report on suicide in Asia. Although impulsive personality traits are sometimes linked to illnesses like bipolar disorder, studies in China have not uncovered full-fledged personality disorders in impulsive suicide victims.

In a tragic twist, impulsive victims in Asia tend to favor highly fatal methods. After interviewing family members and friends of 505 Chinese suicide victims, Kenneth Conner, a psychiatric researcher at the University of Rochester Medical Center in New York, and colleagues reported in 2005 that those who had ingested pesticides were more likely to have acted rashly than were those who used other methods such as hanging or drowning. Pesticides are a leading cause of suicide death in China and India, and the cause of roughly half of suicides worldwide. Pesticides may also explain Asia’s unusual suicide sex ratio, Jha says. In the West, women attempt suicide just as frequently as men do, but they tend to down sleeping pills—and often survive.

The trends in Asia point to a need for innovative prevention strategies. Zhang believes efforts should focus less on mental illness and more on “educating people to have realistic goals in life and teaching them to cope with crisis.” Front and center should be universities and rural women’s organizations, both of which already have active suicide prevention programs in China, he says. Such community-based approaches appear to have been effective in Hong Kong, Yip says. Over the past decade, the territory has rolled out programs for schoolchildren on dealing with stress and outreach groups for older adults. Its suicide rate has fallen 27% since 2003.

But resources in many Asian countries are limited. The vast majority of cities in China and India still do not have 24-hour suicide prevention hotlines. That may make what scholars call means restriction—reducing access to tools commonly used in suicide—a better goal. In Sri Lanka, pesticides once accounted for two-thirds of suicide deaths. Then in 1995, the government took steps to ban the most toxic pesticides. The suicide rate plummeted by 50% in the following decade.

The varying degrees to which mental illness and suicide correlate in East and West may ultimately be beside the point, argues Zhang, who believes a third factor may be the trigger in both regions. Strain theory, which posits that societal pressures, rather than inborn traits, contribute to crime, can help explain suicide, he believes. “Psychological strains usually precede a suicidal behavior, and they also happen before an individual becomes mentally ill.”

When a person is pulled by two or more conflicting pressures, Zhang says, as with “a girl who receives Confucian values at home and then goes to school and learns about modern values and gender equality,” she may be more prone to suicide. Other situational stresses may include a sudden crisis faced by a rural woman lacking coping mechanisms—such as the case of Mrs. Y—or an incident that forces a young man to confront a gap between his aspirations and reality. Zhang found that strain theory held up for his study subjects in rural China. He plans to probe whether it also applies to older Chinese.

Ultimately, Zhang hopes to test strain theory on Americans. The U.S. National Institutes of Health “spends millions and millions of dollars every year on treating mental illness to prevent suicide,” he says. “But no matter how much money we spend, how many psychiatrists we train, or how much work we do in psychiatric clinics, the U.S. suicide rate doesn’t decrease.” It has hovered around 10 to 12 suicides per 100,000 people since 1960.

Such research may be the tip of the iceberg when it comes to debunking long-held ideas about behavior disorders. Alcoholism is another area ripe for exploration, Cheng says: The profile of alcoholics in China contrasts sharply with that in the West. Because of social pressure to drink, Chinese alcoholics are far more likely to be working and married than American counterparts, who are often unemployed and divorced, she says. Suicide, Cheng muses, “is just another example of how environment can change behavior.”

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/338/6110/1025.full

Hundreds Of Deer Mysteriously Jumping To Their Deaths Off Idaho Bridge

On By A.P.In Deer, Idaho, Nature, suicideLeave a comment

 

Idaho wildlife officials are puzzled as to why hundreds of deer have jumped off a bridge to their deaths.

Motorists tell officials they have witnessed deer jumping off High Bridge and plunging more than 100 feet to their deaths while they are driving by.

“I’ve seen it myself and some of our staff have seen it too,” Evin Oneale, a manager with the Idaho Fish and Game Development, told KBOI-TV.

Oneale believes that the deer are just trying to jump away from the oncoming cars.

“The first thing a deer is going to do is try and get away,” he told the station. “They jump over what they think is just into the barrow pit, but it’s a 120-foot fall to the river below.”

The station reports the Idaho Fish and Game, along with Idaho’s Department of Transportation, built an underpass for the animals back in 2010 in an effort to help curb the deer jumping. Officials say it has worked but warn motorists to slow down as to not startle the deer into jumping.

http://seattle.cbslocal.com/2012/11/12/hundreds-of-deer-mysteriously-jumping-to-their-deaths-off-idaho-bridge/

Parasite in cat litter may increase risk of suicide

On By A.P.In Cats, defecation, Denmark, Human Behavior, Maryland, Neuropsychiatric Disease, suicide, Teodor Postolache, University of Maryland, ViolenceLeave a comment

 

Women infected with the common cat parasite Toxoplasma gondii, which lurks in litter boxes, may suffer undetected brain changes that lead to personality changes and even mental illness. That’s according to a new study of more than 45,000 women in Denmark published Monday in the Archives of General Psychiatry. The parasite, excreted in cat feces, also spreads through undercooked meat and unwashed vegetables. Pregnant women have long been warned to avoid the parasite, because they can pass it onto their fetus, causing brain damage or stillbirth. In the new study, researchers found that women infected by T. gondii were one and a half times more likely to try to take their own lives than those who were not affected. They were also more likely to try to commit suicide violently—with a gun, sharp object, or by jumping, Time reports. Suicide risk increased with the levels of T. gondii antibodies found. “We can’t say with certainty that T. gondii caused the women to try to kill themselves, but we did find a predictive association between the infection and suicide attempts later in life that warrants additional studies,” study author Teodor Postolache, an associate professor of psychiatry and director of the Mood and Anxiety Program at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, said in a press statement.

 

Michael Marin, Arizona man, commits suicide in court after being found guilty of arson

On By A.P.In Arizona, arson, Crime, Michael Marin, Phoenix, suicideLeave a comment

Arizona man Michael Marin collapsed in court and died Thursday after hearing a jury convict him of burning down his $3.5 million mansion, CBS affiliate KPHO-TVreports.

Court officials said the judge and lawyers were discussing aggravating factors and the jury was out of the room when 53-year-old Marin’s face suddenly turned red and he collapsed to the floor.

He was taken to the hospital where he was pronounced dead, according to the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office.

Investigators said Marin deliberately burned down his $3.5 million suburban Phoenix mansion in July 2009 after it failed to sell at a charity auction and he could no longer pay the mortgage. He was seen escaping the fire by climbing down a rope ladder while wearing scuba gear.

A Maricopa County Superior Court jury found Marin guilty Thursday afternoon of arson of an occupied structure. Prosecutors said he could face16 years in prison if he was convicted.

A video recording of Marin’s last moments in court has some officials wonder whether his death was a suicide. The video showed Marin cover his mouth and his hands while hearing the guilty verdict and apparently swallowing something, KPHO-TV reports.

He was also seen occasionally sipping from a sports drink bottle before his body twisted into violent convulsions.