Researchers suggest that they can identify U.S. soldiers at high risk of suicide via big data predictive analytics before they are discharged from a hospital.
Suicide rate amongst U.S. soldiers who have returned from Afghanistan and Iraq has increased. Latest study can help healthcare professionals identify high risk soldiers and intervene to avoid any possible suicides.
Researchers reveal that they analyzed data of over 40,000 U.S. Army soldiers who were hospitalized for a psychiatric condition between 2004 and 2009. The study points out that people admitted for psychiatric diagnosis in hospitals are at an elevated risk for suicide once discharged. However, suicide is still not very common in this high risk category and it is not possible for everyone released from psychiatric hospitalization should undergo a suicide prevention program.
For the purpose of the study, researchers also analyzed data of over 53,000 regular soldiers for a year after they were discharged from hospital following psychiatric diagnosis between 2004 and 2009. The researchers also examined a number of likely suicidal predictors from Army and Department of Defense administrative files, which contains information about all soldiers. The researchers suggest that big data machine-learning methods enabled them to generate a suicide prediction algorithm.
The algorithm revealed that 5 percent of the total hospitalized soldiers fell in the category of high post hospital discharge suicide risk and soldiers in this category also accounted for about 53 percent of the total post-hospital suicides. The study also revealed that soldiers who were at elevated risk of committing suicide also had increased risk of unintentional suicides attempts and re-hospitalizations after being discharged.
The researchers also found that around 46 percent of the high risk soldiers came across one of the adverse events after a year of getting discharged from the hospital.
Ronald Kessler, McNeil Family Professor of Health Care Policy at Harvard Medical School, who is also the lead author of the study, reveals that it is notable to find that high suicide rate was in the 5 percent of high suicide risk soldiers.
"The fact that nearly half of all highest-risk hospitalizations were followed by at least one adverse outcome -- either suicide, unintentional injury death, suicide attempt or rehospitalization -- argues strongly for developing expanded post-hospital preventive intervention services for these highest-risk soldiers," says Kessler.
Experts believe that the study is an important development as it can save the lives of many war veterans on a regular basis.
The study has been published in JAMA Psychiatry.
