Abstract
Considerable effort has been devoted to incorporate temporal trends in disease mapping. In this line, this work describes the importance of including the effect of the seasonality in a particular setting related with suicides. In particular, the number of suicide-related emergency calls is modeled by means of an autoregressive approach to spatio-temporal disease mapping that allows for incorporating the possible interaction between both temporal and spatial effects. Results show the importance of including seasonality effect, as there are differences between the number of suicide-related emergency calls between the four seasons of each year.
Highlights
Suicide is a global health problem that is receiving increasing interest worldwide [1]
Previous research has mainly focused on individual and familiar characteristics of suicide, an increasing number of studies have suggested that spatial patterns would have an impact in suicide risk, in other words, that suicide would not be randomly distributed across the space, but subjected to underlying spatial patterns [4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13]
Other studies have shown the seasonality of suicide: previous research suggests that the prevalence of suicide deaths are not constant, but varies during the year [14,15,16,17,18]
Summary
Suicide is a global health problem that is receiving increasing interest worldwide [1]. The numbers would even increase if we take into account the suicide attempts where the victim survives These data highlight the necessity of further analyzing the different mechanisms that may be involved in this problem. Other studies have shown the seasonality of suicide: previous research suggests that the prevalence of suicide deaths are not constant, but varies during the year [14,15,16,17,18]. These studies have shown that there is a peak of suicide cases in spring and summer, and the findings are similar independently of the study country. Linking both ideas of area patterns and seasonality would result in the most appropriate approach to conduct an ecologic study of suicides [4,10]
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