You Learn Something New Everyday: Women with Cats May Have Higher Suicide Risk

What's a phrase you say a lot?

Do you want to know mine?

"You learn something new everyday." 

When someone says "Oh, I didn't know that," or "That's definitely new information to me," my response is always "You learn something new every day." 

You want to know what I learned today? Well, if you don't, quit reading this now. If you do, it's this:

Women with Cats May Have Higher Suicide Risk

First, I saw this picture.  Then I had to ask myself, "Wait, I wonder if this is actually true."

Turns out, it's very true. Well, sort of. They did a study and came up with some interesting conclusions. If you'd like to read the full article, it's here, or if you'd just like the abridged version, just keep reading.

So Basically, there is a parasite in cat poo. It is called the Toxoplasma Gondii Parasite. We're just going to call it TG for short. TG is not in all feline fecal matter, only in cats that ingested an infected prey.

It wasn't necessarily proven that there is a correlation, but the studies did show some pretty undeniable results. 

They find out if a mother if infected with TG by testing her baby for the antibodies to protect against it at birth. Babies don't typically produce antibodies to the parasite until three months after their birth, thus newborns with antibodies suggest their mom's were already infected by the parasite.

After this, they did a study on which mother's already had a previous history of mental illness that may contribute to the suicidal thoughts and calculated this into their equation.

What the researchers did find is an increase in suicide risk for women that corresponded with the level of parasite antibodies found in the children's blood test. Their research suggest this causes women to be one a half times more likely to attempt or commit suicide compared to those who were not infected.

More than 500 of the 46,000 women in the study attempted suicide, which is still a relatively small risk, but it is still there.

The fact that is even scarier: one out of every three people in the world are thought to be infected with this parasite.

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So, readers, you learned something new today. Unless you already knew this, which in that case, you probably learned something else new today. Maybe you just want to prove me wrong and you didn't learn anything new, today. In any case, keep this in mind. You have all sorts of experiences each day. You meet new people, learn new things. Embrace it.