Abstract
Background: The Slavic countries of the former Soviet Union (fSU) Russia and Belarus retain one of the highest suicide rates in the world, despite a gradual decline over the past decade. Aim: The present study aims to analyze whether population drinking is able to explain the dramatic fluctuations in suicide mortality in Russia and Belarus from the late Soviet to post-Soviet period. Method: Trends in suicide rates and alcohol sales per capita from 1970 to 2014 in Russia and Belarus were analyzed employing an ARIMA analysis. Results: Alcohol sales is a statistically significant associated with suicide rates in both countries, implying that a 1-l increase in per capita alcohol sales is associated with an increase in the suicide rates of 5.0% in Russia and of 6.1% in Belarus. Conclusion: This is the first comparative time-series analysis of alcohol sales and suicide rates in Russia and Belarus, which highlighted close temporal association between suicide rates and population drinking in both countries.
Highlights
Suicide is one of the leading external causes of death in many countries and it burden is expected to be rising over the several decades [1]
The present study aims to analyze whether population drinking is able to explain the dramatic fluctuations in suicide mortality in Russia and Belarus from the late Soviet to post-Soviet period
The average suicide rates figure for Russia and Belarus was 29.7 ± 5.4 and 25.7 ± 5.8 per 100.000 respectively
Summary
Suicide is one of the leading external causes of death in many countries and it burden is expected to be rising over the several decades [1]. The dramatic fluctuations in suicide mortality in fSU over the past decades have been widely discussed in the scientific literature and are still relatively unexplored [5,6,7,8,9,10]. All the former Soviet republics experienced similar societal transformation, the effect of these transformations in relation to suicide mortality has not been identical [11]. The Slavic countries of the former Soviet Union (fSU) Russia and Belarus retain one of the highest suicide rates in the world, despite a gradual decline over the past decade
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