(Press-News.org) Editor’s Note: September is National Suicide Prevention Month.
COLUMBUS, Ohio – Research led by The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center and Wesleyan University found that depression screening tools outperformed suicide risk screenings under most conditions.
“We compared the effectiveness of multiple depression and suicide risk screening methods for the purpose of identifying primary care patients who subsequently attempted suicide. Our findings may generate a lot of discussion within the suicide prevention community, as it contradicts long-held assumptions about suicide risk screening,” said principal investigator Craig J. Bryan, PsyD, clinical psychologist, professor and director of the Division of Recovery and Resilience at Ohio State’s Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Health.
Study findings are published online in the Joint Commission Journal on Quality and Patient Safety.
From 1999 to 2021, the suicide rate in the United States increased by more than 35%, according to the National Vital Statistics Reports. Other researchers have found that approximately half of suicide decedents visit a primary care or general medical provider in the month before their deaths. Suicide decedents are more than twice as likely to visit primary care than a mental health clinic.
This study compared the performance of multiple depression screening methods (Patient Health Questionnaire [PHQ]-2, PHQ-8, and PHQ-9) and multiple suicide risk screening methods (PHQ-9 item 9 and suicide-focused screening of “thoughts of killing yourself”during the entire lifespan, within the past month, and within the past week) in a convenience sample of primary care patients.
During the study, 2,475 patients (military personnel, family members, and retirees) from six military primary care clinics completed the PHQ-9 and screening for suicidal ideation during routine clinic visits.
Follow-up phone interviews were conducted for one year to assess the incidence of suicide attempts. Sensitivity, specificity and accuracy were calculated for each screening method for identifying patients who attempted suicide.
More than 65% of patients who screened positive for suicidal ideation also screened positive for depression on the PHQ-9. Depression screening with the PHQ-9 correctly identified more patients who attempted suicide during follow-up than the PHQ-2.
Five (0.2%) patients attempted suicide within 1 month, 16 (0.6%) attempted suicide within 3 months, 39 (1.4%) attempted suicide within 6 months, and 57 (2.1%) attempted suicide within 12 months of baseline. There were no known suicide deaths.
“Conclusions based on our findings should be made cautiously considering several limitations. Our study examined depression as the only clinical indication for suicide risk screening. These findings may not extrapolate to other potential indications of screening in primary care such as substance use disorders, postpartum depression and other psychiatric conditions,” said co-author Alexis M. May, PhD, assistant professor of psychology at Wesleyan University in Middletown, CT.
Additional research is needed to examine the incremental (or lack of) benefit of depression and suicide risk screening among primary care patients with these indications and other patient subgroups, May said.
Since this study was conducted within the military medical system with adult patients only, this may limit generalizability to other healthcare systems and populations, said Bryan, who is the Trott Gebhardt Philips Endowed Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Health and a senior researcher in The Suicide and Trauma Reduction Initiative for Veterans (STRIVE) at Ohio State. STRIVE is one of the nation’s leading research sites for clinical trials on suicide treatment, prevention and intervention.
This work was supported by the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Health Affairs, through the Defense Medical Research and Development Program.
# # #
END
A research team, led by Professor Joonki Suh in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering and the Graduate School of Semiconductor Materials and Devices Engineering at UNIST, has made a significant breakthrough in thin film deposition technology. By employing an innovative atomic layer deposition (ALD) process, Professor Seo successfully achieved regular arrangement of tellurium (Te) atoms at low temperatures as low as 50 degrees Celsius.
The ALD method is a cutting-edge thin film process that enables precise stacking ...
The National Institutes of Health will award up to $2 million in cash prizes to accelerate development of diagnostic and monitoring technologies that improve fetal health outcomes in low-resource settings. The Rapid Acceleration of Diagnostics Technology (RADx® Tech) Fetal Monitoring Challenge calls on scientists, engineers, and clinicians around the country to submit their innovative approaches and compete for prizes and additional resources to support technology development and clinical impact. The challenge is sponsored by the NIH’s National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB), ...
Many pathogens, including the virus that causes COVID-19, are thought to have originated in wild animals before spilling into human populations.
Agriculture is often blamed for accelerating this process, which is known as zoonotic spillover, through deforestation and habitat fragmentation that reduce biodiversity and increase the likelihood of contact between infected wildlife and humans.
But in a Perspectives article published online Sept. 15 in the journal One Earth, University of Michigan ecologist Ivette Perfecto and her colleagues argue that agriculture can both help and hinder: ...
More than 720,000 Floridians will be living with Alzheimer’s disease by 2025. Currently, Florida has the second highest prevalence of Alzheimer’s disease in the United States and is the sixth leading cause of death in Floridians 65 and older.
Although the epidemic of age-related brain dysfunction – of which Alzheimer’s disease is a major factor – is growing at an alarming rate, there is a disconnect between the existing care model designed for urgent care and the progressive nature of this chronic condition, which tends to worsen over time.
To address this widespread health concern, Florida Atlantic University’s Schmidt College ...
(COLUMBUS, Ohio) – Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is among the most common pediatric neurodevelopmental disorders. In 2019, nearly 10% of United States (U.S.) children had a diagnosis of ADHD. Approximately 3.3 million children, or roughly 5 out of every 100 children in the U.S., are currently prescribed medication for ADHD.
In a new study, published today in Pediatrics, researchers at the Center for Injury Research and Policy and Central Ohio Poison Center at Nationwide Children’s Hospital investigated the characteristics ...
The Korea Institute of Civil Engineering and Building Technology (KICT, President Kim Byung-Suk) has developed a 'Road Pothole Filtering Program' to establish an emergency road restoration system for frequent pothole occurrences.
Commonly referred to as 'the landmine of the road,' potholes are a road damage phenomenon in which parts of the asphalt sink into bowl-like depressions. Potholes occur when a significant amount of rainwater infiltrates the road surface, weakening the ground below and causing the asphalt ...
A new diagnostic scoring system, developed by renowned breast cancer experts, is now available as an easy-to-use online tool through Susan G. Komen®, the world’s leading breast cancer organization. This tool will help health care providers recognize and effectively diagnose a rare and aggressive breast cancer, inflammatory breast cancer.
The new Inflammatory Breast Cancer (IBC) Scoring System online tool is available at https://www.komen.org/ibc and may help to increase diagnostic accuracy, predict outcomes, guide treatment decisions ...
Weather data from several ships bombed by Japanese pilots at Pearl Harbor has been recovered in a rescue mission that will help scientists understand how the global climate is changing.
Crew members aboard various vessels - such as the USS Pennsylvania and the USS Tennessee - died when their battleships were targeted in December 1941. Despite these losses, many boats returned to service during the Second World War and US naval servicemen continued their daily duties, which included recording weather data.
A new research paper, published in Geoscience Data ...
Investigators found and catalogued mysterious RNA circles that are linked to brain cell identity
Findings show that circular RNA is produced by brain cells damaged in Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s disease
Circular RNA production from one Parkinson’s gene DNAJC6 was abnormal even prior to symptom onset
Researchers are gaining new insights into neurological diseases by studying circular RNAs (circRNAs) in brain cells. A new study by investigators from the Brigham and Women’s Hospital, a founding member of the Mass General ...
A new study published in a Nature Partner Journal, npj Microgravity, finds an engineered compound given to mice aboard the International Space Station (ISS) largely prevented the bone loss associated with time spent in space. The study, led by a transdisciplinary team of professors at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) and the Forsyth Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, highlight a promising therapy to mitigate extreme bone loss from long-duration space travel as well as musculoskeletal ...
