Increased risk suicide death associated with hospitalization for infection
While psychological predictors of suicide have been studied extensively, less attention has been paid to the effect of biological factors, such as infection. Helene Lund-Sørensen, B.M., of Copenhagen University Hospital, Denmark, and coauthors used Danish nationwide registers to investigate associations between infectious diseases and the risk of death by suicide. All individuals 15 or older living in Denmark from 1980 through 2011 were included, resulting in study population of more than 7.2 million individuals. A history of infection was defined as one or more infection diagnoses since 1977. Infections were grouped into categories, including pathogen (i.e. bacterial, viral, others) and infection type (i.e. sepsis, hepatitis, genital, central nervous system, HIV or AIDS, etc.). Among the more than 7.2 million individuals, there were 809,384 (11.2 percent) hospitalized with infection during follow-up. There were 32,683 suicides during follow-up and of those 7,892 (24.1 percen...