Physical Illness and Suicidal Behaviour

Risk for attempted suicide in children and youths after contact with somatic hospitals: a Danish register based nested case–control study

“…Previous register-based studies among adult patients have found an increased risk of suicide in young patients with IDDM, and in cancer patients and patients suffering from epilepsy 8 18. Other studies show conflicting results on the association between cancer and risk of suicide in children and youths, whereas an unambiguous association between epilepsy and increased risk of suicidal behaviour in children and youths has been demonstrated 19–21.…”

“…Other studies show conflicting results on the association between cancer and risk of suicide in children and youths, whereas an unambiguous association between epilepsy and increased risk of suicidal behaviour in children and youths has been demonstrated 19–21. To our knowledge there is a lack of studies on asthma and suicide among adults with a coherent methodological design 18. The variations in these results can be explained by different methodology such as the applied statistics, small samples (especially among children and youths) and the heterogeneity of the risk groups of suicide and attempted suicide.…”

“…The general tendency however, is that there is no association between children diagnosed with cancer and later increased risk of suicide,14–17 whereas such an association can be found among adults 18. Finally, a range of studies has found an association between epilepsy and increased risk of suicide and attempted suicide 19–23…”

Elderly suicide in primary care

“…Stenager and Stenager (2000) reviewed the subject of suicide and physical health and explained the main difficulties in researching this area: suicide is a rare event, evidence for selection bias, defining and selecting control group, comparing dead persons with living persons who might yet develop physical illness or commit suicide, length of the study, standardizing age and sex, finding clearly defined diagnostic criteria for somatic illness, and deciding whether death was caused by suicide or physical illness in some cases. They believed that risk of suicide is increased in a number of physical disorders, e.g.…”

The Isle of Wight Suicide Study: a case study of suicide in a limited geographic area

“…A number of social and economic factors including unemployment (Gunnell et al 1999), divorce, serious medical illness (Stenager & Stenager 2000) and substance misuse are commonly associated with suicide (Qin et al 2003).…”