Research finding · May 2024
Relatives of individuals who died by suicide may have elevated levels of suicide risk
Suicide risk is complex, with a large range of potential risk factors including environmental and psychosocial factors, as well as biological influences such as genetics. Research has shown that having a family member who died by suicide could potentially contribute to suicide risk for family members. However, the majority of research indicating this has been conducted in Northwestern European countries due to the unique availability of health and multi-generational registries there. A comparative look is needed to see if this risk factor is also relevant in the United States, but U.S. data resources for studying familial risk are limited.
With this in mind, Dr. Amanda Bakian and her team examined data from the Utah Population Database, a unique repository of biomedical information that spans generations and degrees of familial relation. In her study, Dr. Bakian included all people in Utah who died by suicide between 1904 and 2014, and looked at over 2.1 million of their relatives. She then compared them to over 11.3 million relatives of people who did not die by suicide. Results indicated that the risk for suicide was higher in the family members (first- through fifth-degree relatives) of people who died by suicide. Dr. Bakian also found that risk levels were higher if the person who died by suicide was a young adult or woman. Understanding these familial patterns can help tailor public health interventions to target these specific groups more effectively.
Citation: Bakian, A. V., Chen, D., Coon, H., Docherty, A. R., Gray, D., Hanson, H. A., Keeshin, B., Smith, K. R., VanDerslice, J. A., Yu, D. Z., Zhang, C., & Zhang, Y. (2023). A population-wide analysis of the familial risk of suicide in Utah, USA. Psychological Medicine, 53(4), 1448-1457. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0033291721003020
This finding comes from an AFSP-funded study — see the grant below ↓
