The National Institutes of Health has released a 10-year road map for optimizing youth suicide prevention efforts.
The abridged version of the final report from a March 2016 NIH Pathways to Prevention Workshop entitled “Advancing Research to Prevent Youth Suicide,” highlights strategies for guiding the next decade of research on youth suicide prevention, Todd D. Little, PhD, from Texas Tech University, Lubbock, and his colleagues reported online Oct. 3.
The article outlines 29 recommendations aimed at improving data systems, enhancing data collection and analysis, and strengthening the research and practice community, and calls on researchers and practitioners to “unite to stop youth suicide in order to circumvent its associated economic cost and devastating pain and suffering” (Ann Intern Med. 2016 Oct 4. doi: 10.7326/M16-1568).
“Adherence to the recommendations summarized herein provides us with a road map to our ultimate goal – eliminating suicide,” the authors concluded.
In an accompanying evidence review, Holly C. Wilcox, PhD, and her colleagues from Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, identified studies and potentially linkable external data systems with suicide outcomes and concluded that community data systems should be linked to suicide prevention data for the purpose of evaluating and enhancing prevention efforts.
“By integrating data from health care delivery systems, health insurance systems, and other populationwide data sources ... a national health research data infrastructure could be developed,” they wrote, adding that such a “national resource” could facilitate linkage with suicide prevention data (Ann Intern Med. 2016 Oct 4. doi: 10.7326/M16-1281).
During a press telebriefing on the panel’s findings, Dr. Little, who served as panel and workshop chair, stressed that suicide is the second-leading cause of death among youth aged 10 to 24 years, and in young adults aged 25 to 34 years.
“Although these numbers are disheartening, we feel that suicide prevention is possible. New research strategies that embrace the complex factors involved in suicide can be coordinated and are necessary,” he said, adding that “the complexity of suicide prevention must be embraced in order to forge new research strategies,” and that researchers and practitioners must work together and with the larger “policy, practice, and research communities” to promote data sharing and stop youth suicide.
Dr. Little also noted the importance of destigmatizing suicide attempts and suicidal behavior to remove one of the roadblocks to reporting, which in turn will increase the available data for linkage.
The linkage of data from various sources, such as emergency departments, electronic health records, Medicaid, and Medicare, is particularly important for informing future prevention efforts, said panelist Leslie-Ann Byam, project director for the Families First Project at Evidence-Based Associates in Washington.
Continuing to work in the field and to work with young people without having information that encompasses that kind of data leaves practitioners at a disadvantage in terms of planning, she said.
Panelist Kathleen M. Roche, PhD, of George Washington University in Washington, stressed the importance of obtaining data on subpopulations of youth at very elevated risk of suicide, including transgender youth, Latinas, and Native Americans.
The NIH workshop was cosponsored by the NIH Office of Disease Prevention, the National Institute of Mental Health, the National Institute on Drug Abuse, and the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health. Individual authors were supported by grants from the National Science Foundation; the NIH; the Penn State Quantitative Social Sciences Initiative; the Institute for Measurement, Methodology, Analysis, and Policy at Texas Tech University; and the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences. Dr. Little reported receiving fees from Yhat Enterprises outside the submitted work. The evidence review was funded by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. The review authors reported having no disclosures.