I hate teaser headlines like this. How about something straightforward, like "Low-oxygen air messes up serotonin / dopamine levels, can lead to suicide"?
But that's not really a fact, is it? It's a hypothesis from one scientist. There's enough sensationalism in science reporting already. Putting a complex idea into one sentence that is wrong isn't any better than a teaser.
> Low-oxygen air messes up serotonin / dopamine levels
Phrased this way, I'm pretty sure—anecdotally—that at least the converse of that is true, so I would certainly believe a correlation.
I tend to get migraines when in rooms with low-quality/"stuffy" (i.e. low-oxygen, high CO2) air, for example cars with the windows up and vents off. Oddly, deep breathing or purposefully hyperventilating does nothing to alleviate this, so it's probably more a "judgement" by my brain of the air quality than any physiological necessity.
It used to happen only rarely, but when I began taking dopamine agonists, it now happens far more often. It also doesn't seem to happen if I'm dozing off in a room that happens to be stuffy. So, it feels like my brain has a bar for air-quality, below which it will get rather upset at me—and that that bar goes higher the more awake+stimulated it is.
I could believe, if this is a Regular Human Thing, that some bio-feedback mechanism on top of this would then lead people who live in chronically low-air-quality environments to produce fewer of the neurotransmitters that put them in awake+stimulated states, and more of the ones that put them in dreary/dozing/hibernating states.
