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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.
But this isn't the first time T. gondii infection, or toxoplasmosis, has been associated with behavioral changes in people, Postolache says. Previous studies have shown links to schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and even the chance that a person will get in an automobile accident.
www.npr.org
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.
But this isn't the first time T. gondii infection, or toxoplasmosis, has been associated with behavioral changes in people, Postolache says. Previous studies have shown links to schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and even the chance that a person will get in an automobile accident.

A Parasite Carried By Cats Could Increase Suicide Risk
A study of more than 45,000 women in Denmark finds an association between suicide attempts and infection with a common parasite. The findings don't prove the parasite is the cause, but they add more evidence to a hypothesis that's been gaining momentum.

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