TUESDAY, July 3, 2007 (HealthDay News) -- People diagnosed with epilepsy are five times more likely than their peers to commit suicide in the six months following the diagnosis, Danish researchers report.
According to the study, people with epilepsy are three times more likely to commit suicide overall than the general population. Among people with epilepsy, women are more likely than men to commit suicide.
Researchers at Aarhus University Hospital studied more than 21,000 cases of suicide in Denmark between 1981 and 1997. They compared that data against information from more than 423,000 people who did not commit suicide.
Reporting in the August issue of The Lancet Neurology, a greater percentage of those who committed suicide had epilepsy, the researchers said. When the team took out confounding factors such as income, place of residence and work absenteeism, they still found that people with epilepsy were twice as likely to commit suicide as people without the illness.
People with psychiatric diseases in addition to epilepsy are at even greater risk of suicide. They were 29 times more likely to commit suicide in the six months following diagnosis and 14 times more likely to commit suicide overall, the study found.
However, in contrast to the general population -- in which suicide risk increases with age -- the data indicated that people with epilepsy are less likely to commit suicide as they age.
More information
For more on epilepsy, visit the Epilepsy Foundation.
