THURSDAY, June 18 (HealthDay News) -- Almost 25 percent of people who take their own lives are intoxicated when they commit the act, U.S. health officials report. From 2001 to 2005, there were an estimated 79,646 alcohol-attributable deaths each year and some 5,800 of those deaths were associated with suicide, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
"This is the first study that shows alcohol is connected to suicide in a number of population groups," said report author Dr. Alex Crosby, a medical epidemiologist in the division of violence prevention at the CDC's Injury Center. "There are some groups that may be at greater risk for alcohol being related to a suicide event."
Other studies have shown that alcohol is a risk factor for suicide, Crosby added.
The report is published in the June 19 issue of the CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. To reach its conclusions, Crosby's team used data from 17 states, sourced from the National Violent Death Reporting System for the years 2005 and 2006. They studied the relationship between alcohol and suicide in different racial/ethnic groups. Dr. David L. Katz, director of the Prevention Research Center at Yale University School of Medicine, said the study sheds light on how alcohol and suicide interact.
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