Lois M. Collins covers policy and research impacting families for the Deseret News.
SALT LAKE CITY — As suicide rates have been climbing for several decades and policymakers and others look for tools to identify and protect those at risk, recognizing the impact of heat stress and air pollution could prove helpful.
That's from a new study by a team at the University of Utah that finds a relationship between increasing heat and suicide risk year-round, along with specific risks from nitrogen dioxide associated with winter air inversions. The research, published in Environment International, showed that the effect of heat on suicide risk becomes amplified in the warm season because of nitrogen dioxide and fine particulate pollution."The two-week period just before suicide is a critical time for intervention," lead author Amanda Bakian, research associate professor of psychiatry at University of Utah Health and a Huntsman Mental Health Institute investigator, said in a written statement. "So we're really trying to understand what's happening in that really short-term period."She told Deseret News that the research springs from an earlier paper that analyzed the relationship between short-term ambient air pollution and the risk of suicide death in Salt Lake County, finding suicide numbers climb after short-term exposure to nitrogen dioxide and fine particulate pollution.Other studies reached the same conclusion, which was important because they could only show association and not causation. But the early university study was still in a single location and considered just one environmental exposure at a time — heat or pollution."We're not exposed individually," Bakian said, but rather to a mixture of conditions, including air quality and weather factors. So the next step was looking at the mixture — and doing it across a longer period of time and a bigger geographic area. So researchers looked at data from 7,500 suicide cases across Utah between 2000 and 2016 . And they included multiple components including heat and nitrogen dioxide and fine particulate pollution and how they might combine to raise suicide risk, with a focus on the six days before the suicide.The new study used a measure of heat stress called wet bulb globe temperature, which captures "how hot it really feels outside," she said. "It doesn't just reflect air temperature. It also considers how much humidity, sunlight and wind there is. When it's humid, sweat doesn't dry as easily, so your body can't co
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