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Centre for Policy on Ageing | |
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Physical health and mental disorder in elderly suicide
— a case-control study | | Author(s) | M Préville, R Hébert, R Boyer |
| Journal title | Aging & Mental Health, vol 9, no 6, November 2005 |
| Pages | pp 576-584 |
| Source | http://www.tandfonline.com |
| Keywords | Health [elderly] ; Mental disorder ; Suicide ; Correlation ; Canada. |
| Annotation | The psychological autopsy method was used to study all 95 cases of suicide involving people aged 60+ registered in Quebec, Canada in 1998 and 1999. 95 comparison subjects matched for gender, age, region and date of death were selected from the death register. This study showed that suicide cases did not differ from controls with regard to the number of chronic health problems and, compared to suicide cases, the controls had less functional autonomy 6 months prior to death. If minor and sub-threshold depression cases were included, 74.7% of the suicide cases would have been considered as having a mental health disorder compared to 12.6% in the control group. When the effect of other co-variables were controlled for, multivariate analysis showed that suicide cases and controls did not differ according to marital status, education, income and living arrangements. Furthermore, suicide cases were no more likely than controls to seldom meet with family members of friends or to have been isolated during the 6 months preceding death. These findings suggest that detection of psychiatric disorders - mainly depression - must be included in late life suicide prevention strategies. (RH). |
| Accession Number | CPA-060202244 A |
| Classmark | CC: E: EV: 49: 7S |
Data © Centre for Policy on Ageing |
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| ...from the Ageinfo database published by Centre for Policy on Ageing. |
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