The relationship between elderly suicide rates and smoking in England and Wales

Abstract

Completed suicides have been shown to be associated with smoking cigarettes in cohort studies of mainly female registered nurses in the U.S.A. (Hemenway et al., 1993), both sexes in the Finnish general population (Tanskanen et al., 2000), male army recruits in the U.S.A. (Miller et al., 2000a), males in the U.S. general population (Davey Smith et al., 1992), army recruits in Sweden (Hemmingsson and Kriebel, 2003), males aged 40–69 years in the general population in Japan (Iwasaki et al., 2005), and the elderly in a retirement community in the U.S.A. (Ross et al., 1990). Also, a Swiss case-control study of army recruits reported similar findings (Angst and Clayton, 1998). Additionally, positive correlation between prevalence rates of smoking and both general population (Shah and Bhandarkar, 2008) and elderly (Shah, 2008) male suicide rates has been observed in large cross-national ecological studies. This relationship between completed suicides and smoking was “dose-dependent” (Hemenway et al., 1993; Tanskanen et al., 2000; Miller et al., 2000a; Davey Smith et al., 1992; Hemmingsson and Kriebel, 2003; Iwasaki et al., 2005). Moreover, this relationship was maintained in some studies after controlling for confounding variables including demographic characteristics, socioeconomic characteristics, levels of alcohol consumption, psychiatric symptoms and physical health (Tanskanen et al., 2000; Miller et al., 2000a), but disappeared in other studies (Hemmingsson and Kriebel, 2003; Shah, 2008; Shah and Bhandarkar, 2008).