FRIDAY, June 4 (HealthDay News) -- Lower intelligence quotient (IQ) scores in young men are associated with a higher risk of future suicide, but the relationship does not hold true for men who are identified as having psychosis, according to research published June 3 in BMJ.
G. David Batty, Ph.D., of the University of Glasgow in the United Kingdom, and colleagues conducted a study of 1,109,475 Swedish men with a recorded IQ measurement in early adulthood. The main outcome measure was subsequent hospital admission for a suicide attempt.
After adjustment for socioeconomic status and age, the researchers found that lower IQ scores in young adulthood were associated with a significantly higher risk of attempted suicide by any means (hazard ratio, 1.57 for each standard deviation decrease in IQ). Similar associations were found for several specific methods of attempting suicide. Men in the lowest IQ group were nearly nine times as likely as those in the highest group to attempt suicide, the investigators discovered. When a separate analysis of only men with psychosis was done, the relationship of IQ to suicide risk did not hold.
"A greater understanding of IQ-suicide associations, particularly in the presence or absence of psychosis, provides a novel insight into the process by which people come to make the decision to attempt suicide. Given the novelty of these findings, further research is needed to provide a deeper understanding, which will inform public health strategies and may lead to a reduction in future attempted and subsequently completed suicides," the authors write.
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