|
 Although the overall suicide risk is still very low, children and
adults who lost a parent during childhood may benefit from extra
attention to offset this long lasting effect, the study's lead
author said.
"The doubled risk of suicide is worth paying attention to as suicide
is preventable and the challenge for research is to narrow down risk
factors so we can target public health interventions to high risk
groups," said Mai-Britt Guldin, of Aarhus University in Denmark.
"This would be the main goal of research like ours."
Past research has shown an increased risk of suicide among people
whose parents committed suicide, but little is known about the risk
when a parent dies from other causes, Guldin and colleagues write in
JAMA Psychiatry.
About 3 percent to 4 percent of people in Western countries
experience the death of a parent during childhood, the researchers
note.
For the new analysis, the study team examined data collected between
1968 and 2008 on 7.3 million people in the national registries of
Denmark, Sweden and Finland. They found that about 189,000 people,
or about 3 percent, had experienced a parent's death before age 18.
The researchers then compared those survivors to 1.89 million people
who didn't lose a parent in childhood.
Over the next 40 years, about 0.14 percent of people who lost
parents as children died by suicide, compared to about 0.07 percent
of people whose parents hadn't died prematurely.
People whose parents died by suicide were about 3.4 times more
likely to also die by suicide later on, and those whose parents died
of other causes were about twice as likely to die of suicide,
compared to people who hadn't lost a parent as a child.
People who lost parents before the age of six were especially
vulnerable to suicide, with nearly three times the risk of those who
didn't lose a parent, the researchers found. Males who lost a parent
also had twice the suicide rate of females who did.
[to top of second column] |
The increased risk of suicide after a parent's death during
childhood remained high for about 25 years.
"This means that we need to look at the support we provide for
bereaved children and youth," Guldin told Reuters Health in an
email. "Clinicians and patients may profit from knowledge from this
study because suicide after parental loss is preventable," she said.
"One clinical strategy could be to monitor distress in bereaved
children and provide individualized support to help highly
distressed children cope with bereavement," Guldin added.
The study team says it's unclear why people who experience a
parent's death during childhood would be more likely to die by
suicide, but some explanations could be shared genetic traits,
environmental factors and stress.
"Closing this gap in our knowledge would be a pivotal point in
further research," Guldin said.
SOURCE: http://bit.ly/1MpUjRK JAMA Psychiatry, online November 11,
2015.
[© 2015 Thomson Reuters. All rights
reserved.] Copyright 2015 Reuters. All rights reserved. This material may not be published,
broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
 |
