Introduction: Suicide is a major public health concern, claiming close to 700 000 lives globally every year. In 2019, it was the fourth leading cause of death among 15–29-year-olds worldwide. Having a history of suicide attempts is the most predictive risk factor for death by suicide. Despite the known burden of youth suicide, this population has not been comprehensively researched. Therefore, the aim of this study was to measure the prevalence of suicide re-attempt in youth admitted to the emergency department following a first suicide attempt.
Methods: This is a single-center prospective and naturalistic study that followed a cohort of 200 young patients aged 16 to 25 years hospitalized for a first suicide attempt. The primary outcome was to measure the prevalence of a second suicide attempt during 3 months of follow-up. As exploratory analyses, we also investigated whether some socio-demographic, clinical and biological markers would help distinguish young suicide re-attempters (SR) from non-suicide re-attempters (non-SR).
Results: Three months post-hospitalization, 21 patients have been lost to follow-up and 33 have been excluded for various reasons. Of the 146 remaining participants, 20 re-attempted suicide during the follow-up period; thereby yielding a prevalence of 14%. This rate was significantly higher than that found in the literature of 6.5% at 3 months in a cohort of 136 451 individuals from the general population (?2 = 11.28; p < 0.001).
Correcting for multiple comparisons, no significant differences were found between SR and non-SR for any sociodemographic, clinical or biological characteristics measured at baseline.
Discussion: To our knowledge, this is the first prospective study to evaluate the risk of suicide re-attempt in youth following an initial suicide attempt. The observed rate in this study, of 14%, suggests that youth are a high-risk group for suicide re-attempt. Consequently, further investigation is warranted to provide a better understanding of the phenomenon, which in turn could potentially be translated into clinical settings.