Elevated suicide risk among those treated for drug use disorders

Epidemiology from Denmark can be so insightful, in large part due to a national registry system that enables researchers to link multiple databases. Morten Hesse and colleagues linked Danish data from 6 databases to identify the risk of suicide among those treated for drug use disorders. Over a ten-year span, approximately 30,000 individuals were treated for a drug use disorder in Denmark - among these, 163 (0.6%) died by suicide. Although this is a relatively small proportion, it still represents an elevated risk: among a matched control group, only 0.1% died by suicide. I also was intrigued by the characteristics of those who died by suicide among those treated for a drug use disorder: 31% had received psychiatric care in the year prior to their death, and risk was higher among those with opiate and alcohol use, though lower among those with marijuana use. The risk for suicide among those with a drug use disorder and no psychiatric history was 7-times that of the general population with no psychiatric history, and those with a drug use disorder and a psychiatric history had a 13-times greater risk. In an earlier study, Pringle and colleagues suggest that to address suicide effectively we need to find population subgroups with increased risk density and identify and deliver targeted interventions to those groups. This Danish study adds to the evidence (summarized by Holly Wilcox and colleagues nearly 15 years ago!) that those with drug use disorders are one such population. Suicide risk among those with drug use disorders is a significant gap in our current approaches to preventing suicide, and an area that requires significant attention.

More here: https://bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12889-020-8261-4

Hesse M et al. Suicide among people treated for drug use disorders: a Danish national record-linkage study. BMC Public Health 20, 146 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12889-020-8261-4