Abstract
Suicide has become one of the leading causes of death of Swiss males aged between 15 and 44 years, whose age-standardized rates are about three times higher than those for females. We compared age-stratified suicide rates of Swiss men and women aged 15-79 years and analysed gender-specific differences from 1950 to 2007. Furthermore, we explored whether changes in measures of family integration can explain changes in suicide trends. The use of multivariate age-period-cohort models avoids age aggregation and allows the exploration of heterogeneous time trends across age, period and birth cohort. In addition, explanatory variables can be included. We found strong gender-specific differences in suicide mortality. Although the same risk factors may act on age and overdispersion, there was no significant correlation between gender-specific cohort effects. Family integration had an effect on Swiss suicide risk but only partially explained the underlying trends over time.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 473-490 |
| Number of pages | 18 |
| Journal | Journal of the Royal Statistical Society. Series A: Statistics in Society |
| Volume | 175 |
| Issue number | 2 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Apr 2012 |
| Externally published | Yes |
Keywords
- Age-period-cohort model
- Bayesian analysis
- Family integration
- Suicide
- Switzerland
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Statistics and Probability
- Social Sciences (miscellaneous)
- Economics and Econometrics
- Statistics, Probability and Uncertainty
