Abstract
The World Health Organization defines suicide as the act of deliberately killing oneself. It is the second leading cause of death among 15-29 year olds globally. To analyze the epidemiological profile and the spatial distribution of suicide deaths in the state of Sergipe. We performed an ecological time-series study with data from the Brazilian Mortality Information System (Sistema de Informações sobre Mortalidade - SIM) about deaths by suicide occurring between 2000 and 2015. We considered as suicide deaths cases recorded as voluntary self-inflicted injuries. Suicide rates were estimated and age-adjusted in the population above 9 years. We analyzed temporal trends by sex and age groups using the simple linear regression model. For the spatial analysis, we performed Kernel density estimation with the software TerraView version 4.2.2. We identified 1,560 suicide cases in the state of Sergipe between 2000 and 2015, with a mean of 97.5 cases per year. We also observed that suicide rates in the state increased 102.3% (from 2.69/100,000 population in 2000 to 5.44 in 2015). Suicides occurred predominantly among males (1,160 cases; 74.35%), single people (1,010 cases; 64.7%), and brown-skinned people (1,039 cases; 66.6%). We observed significantly growing temporal trends in the general population, especially among male adults. Spatial analysis allowed us to draw a map that showed the regions with the highest occurrence of suicide. We observed growing suicide trends in the state of Sergipe and the spatial analysis was an important tool that showed the areas with higher incidences of suicide.
Highlights
The World Health Organization (WHO) defines suicide as the act of deliberately killing oneself
We observed that suicide rates in the state of Sergipe increased linearly from 2000 to 2015 (2.69/100,000 population to 5.44/100,000 population, respectively; Table 1)
The highest percentage of suicide deaths occurred among young adults and adults (76.6% in 20-59 year olds)
Summary
The World Health Organization (WHO) defines suicide as the act of deliberately killing oneself. Even though suicide rates have increased exponentially in recent years,[1] this practice has been a common phenomenon throughout history among different peoples and cultures It is a behavior with multifactorial determinants that can be triggered by a complex interaction of psychological and biological factors including genetic, cultural, social, and environmental elements.[1,2] The WHO estimates that about 800,000 people commit suicide every year in the world (1 suicide every 40 seconds). It is among the world’s top 10 leading causes of death.
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