Crémieux Profile picture
Jun 1, 2023 8 tweets 4 min read Read on X
American military veterans have a suicide problem.

Some have theorized the reason is deployment-related trauma.

Leveraging the random assignment of new soldiers to units with different deployment cycles, Bruhn et al. found that was wrong.

Deployment did not increase suicides. Image
Looking only at violent deployments (ones with peer casualties), there aren't noncombat mortality effects either.

What explains veteran suicide rates? Image
The reason seems to be that the proposition is wrong: veterans do not have increased suicide risk.

This may seem surprising, but it's not. Their suicide rates are elevated over the general population because most of them are young White men. That group has a suicide issue. Image
There are good and bad parts to this observation.

On the one hand, it means that there is not selection of suicidal people into the military.

On the other, demographic selection makes this problem into one that agencies like the VA will probably not be able to fix on their own
because it's not a soldier problem, it's a young White male problem.

I don't know how this can be fixed, but presumably tackling opiate use would help.

Soliman (2022) found that DEA crackdowns on overprescribing pharmacies resulted in fewer local suicide deaths. Image
Soliman also found that sanctioning specific doctors affected opioid-related mortality more generally without impacting suicide rates. Effects were generally larger for males than females and they were larger for people aged 30-49 than those aged 15-29 or 85+. No race data.
Kennedy-Hendricks et al. found that Florida's pill mill crackdown reduced opioid overdose mortality considerably.

Their supplement contained details on the characteristics of the people who died from opioid overdoses, but I wasn't able to access it.

Regardless, this problem can Image

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More from @cremieuxrecueil

Jul 26
I don't think people realize just how wacky things have gotten.

First: The White TFR is ~1.55 and the Black TFR is ~1.53.

Second: Even the stereotypically extreme Hispanic TFR is now below-replacement, at ~1.98. Image
It's hard to overstate just how much things do not stay the same.

It's not even just in the U.S. where fertility rates are now shocking.

This graph shows Saudi Arabia. They're Muslims, so they must be having kids, right? No, they're barely above-replacement.Image
Even the Mormons aren't having kids!

In fact, we're approaching a decade of Utahan fertility being below-replacement! Image
Read 4 tweets
Jul 25
Cervical cancer is being defeated thanks to two things:

Pap smears and the Gardasil vaccine.

HPV vaccination is so effective that many countries will have practically eliminated cervical cancer in the next two decades.

Here's why🧵Image
Cervical cancer develops from HPV because the HP virus integrates itself into cells' DNA and then degrades proteins that keep cell growth in check, leading to precancerous growths and then cancer.

This man received a Nobel Prize for that discovery: Image
The HPV vaccine stops this precursor to cervical cancer in its tracks.

Its effects on the most common types of precancerous growths (HPV16/18—about 70% of all cervical cancers) are near-total prevention. Image
Read 10 tweets
Jul 24
The White House just released a really good executive order on cleaning up America's streets, re-institutionalizing insane people, and ending open air drug abuse and the problems it creates.

Here's a quick overview🧵 Image
The first section is the one I'm most excited for. An alternative name for it could be "Bring Back The Asylums"

It instructs the administration to make it possible to involuntarily commit crazy people again

That crazy hobo pushing a cart full of urine bottles? He's going away! Image
The next section is one that you'll need to familiarize yourself with if you're interested in 'what happens next'.

This was a never achieved goal in Trump-I.

The idea is to compel cities to do what you want by withholding, barring, and giving discretionary funds for compliance. Image
Read 15 tweets
Jul 24
What comes after GLP-1RAs make everyone skinny?

What comes after myostatin inhibitors make everyone buff?

One new candidate is:

Safe, cheap, and easily-administered injections that locally remove fat. A new drug that just passed through phase 2 seems to do just that🧵 Image
The new drug is called CBL-514.

It has a counterpart on the market in the form of deoxycholic acid injections—brand name Kybella.

Kybella is FDA-approved, and it works: it helps people to get rid of their double chins. But there's a catch. Image
Kybella, unfortunately, is not all that safe, and though many patients swear by it, there are notable side effects.

This is predictable, since the way Kybella works is through cytolysis: causing cells to die by rupturing them, releasing their contents, causing inflammation. Image
Read 17 tweets
Jul 23
Pancreatitis is a commonly mention potential side effect of GLP-1RAs, but the evidence for it is poor.

In trials, it doesn't tend to show up more often than in placebo groups, and in high-quality comparisons, risk typically isn't notably elevated.

Risk might even be reduced! Image
There's generally bupkes for pancreatic cancer risk and the evidence for increased pancreatitis risk is similarly poor.

Here's a summary of evidence from before the study whose result I plotted up there: Image
Remember this trial?

It used very high doses of semaglutide and still failed to find any elevation of pancreatitis risk:
Read 8 tweets
Jul 22
Many Founding Fathers wrote under pseudonyms

Pseudonyms afforded the protection needed to write things that were controversial, to engender debate over things they didn't themselves believe in, and to encourage focus on ideas over reputations

Thread of their known pseudonyms🧵 Image
Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay all wrote under the name Publius, after the Roman consul Publius Valerius Poplicola.

This shared authorship became known after Hamilton died, but the individual authors of the Federalist Papers Publius entries remain debated. Image
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John Jay and John Stevens, Jr. shared the Americanus pseudonym when writing various Federalist essays. Image
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Read 20 tweets

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