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Centre for Policy on Ageing | |
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Suicide in the oldest old
— an observational study and cluster analysis | | Author(s) | Mark Sinyor, Lynnette Pei Lin Tan, Ayal Schaffer |
| Journal title | International Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry, vol 31, no 1, January 2016 |
| Publisher | Wiley Blackwell, January 2016 |
| Pages | pp 33-40 |
| Source | www.orangejournal.org |
| Keywords | Suicide ; At risk ; Depression ; 65-69 age group ; Octogenarians ; Evaluation. |
| Annotation | The older population are a high risk group for suicide. This study sought to learn more about the characteristics of suicide in the oldest old and to use a cluster analysis to determine whether oldest old suicide victims assort into clinically meaningful subgroups. Data were collected from a coroner's chart review of suicide victims in Toronto from 1998 to 2011. The study compared two age groups (335 65-79 year olds and 191 80+ year olds) and then conducted a hierarchical agglomerative cluster analysis using Ward's method to identify distinct clusters in the 80+ group. The younger and older age groups differed according to marital status, living circumstances and pattern of stressors. The cluster analysis identified three distinct clusters in the 80+ group. Cluster 1 was the largest at 124 and included people who were either married or widowed who had significantly more depression and somewhat more medical health stressors. In contrast, cluster 2 (50 individuals) comprised people who were almost all single and living alone with significantly less identified depression and slightly fewer medical health stressors. All 17 members of cluster 3 lived in a retirement residence or nursing home, and this group had the highest rates of depression, dementia, other mental illness and past suicide attempts. This is the first study to use the cluster analysis technique to identify meaningful subgroups among suicide victims in the oldest old. The results reveal different patterns of suicide in the older population that may be relevant for clinical care. (JL). |
| Accession Number | CPA-160429243 A |
| Classmark | EV: CA3: ENR: BBE: BBM: 4C |
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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