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A Parasite Carried By Cats Could Increase Suicide Risk : Shots - Health Blog : NPR
There's fresh evidence that cats can be a threat to your mental health.
To be fair, it's not kitties themselves that are the problem, but a parasite they carry called Toxoplasma gondii.
A study of more than 45,000 Danish women found that those infected with this feline parasite were 1.5 times more likely to attempt suicide than women who weren't infected.
That's not a huge increase, but it's probably too big to have been caused by chance, says Teodor Postolache, a University of Maryland psychiatrist and senior author of the paper, which was published in the Archives of General Psychiatry.
Still, the absolute risk of suicide remains very small. Fewer than 1,000 of the women attempted any sort of self-directed violence during the 30-year study span. And just seven committed suicide
There's fresh evidence that cats can be a threat to your mental health.
To be fair, it's not kitties themselves that are the problem, but a parasite they carry called Toxoplasma gondii.
A study of more than 45,000 Danish women found that those infected with this feline parasite were 1.5 times more likely to attempt suicide than women who weren't infected.
That's not a huge increase, but it's probably too big to have been caused by chance, says Teodor Postolache, a University of Maryland psychiatrist and senior author of the paper, which was published in the Archives of General Psychiatry.
Still, the absolute risk of suicide remains very small. Fewer than 1,000 of the women attempted any sort of self-directed violence during the 30-year study span. And just seven committed suicide
