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Suicide in dementia: 9-year national clinical survey in England and Wales.
Purandare N, Voshaar R, Rodway C, Bickley H, Burns AS, Kapur NN
British Journal of Psychiatry. 2009;194( 2).
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Abstract
BACKGROUND: Knowledge of suicide in people with dementia is limited to small case series. AIMS: To describe behavioural, clinical and care characteristics of people with dementia who died by suicide. METHOD: All dementia cases (n=118) from a 9-year national clinical survey of suicides in England and Wales (n=11 512) were compared with age- and gender-matched non-dementia cases (control group) (n=492) by conditional logistic regression. RESULTS: The most common method of suicide in patients with dementia was self-poisoning, followed by drowning and hanging, the latter being less frequent than in controls. In contrast to controls, significantly fewer suicides occurred within 1 year of diagnosis in patients with dementia. Patients with dementia were also less likely to have a history of self-harm, psychiatric symptoms and previous psychiatric admissions. CONCLUSIONS: Known indicators of suicide risk are found less frequently in dementia suicide cases than non-dementia suicide cases. Further research should clarify whether suicide in dementia is a response to worsening dementia or an underappreciation of psychiatric symptoms by clinicians.