Observational Study
Copyright ©The Author(s) 2022. Published by Baishideng Publishing Group Inc. All rights reserved.
World J Psychiatry. Mar 19, 2022; 12(3): 505-520
Published online Mar 19, 2022. doi: 10.5498/wjp.v12.i3.505
Trends in suicide by hanging, strangulation, and suffocation in Serbia, 1991-2020: A joinpoint regression and age-period-cohort analysis
Milena Ilic, Irena Ilic
Milena Ilic, Department of Epidemiology, Faculty of Medical Sciences, University of Kragujevac, Kragujevac 34000, Serbia
Irena Ilic, Faculty of Medicine, University of Belgrade, Belgrade 11000, Serbia
Author contributions: All authors equally contributed to this paper with conception and design of the study, data acquisition and analysis, drafting and critical revision and editing, and approval of the final version.
Supported by Ministry of Education, Science and Technological Development, Republic of Serbia, 2011–2020, No. 175042.
Institutional review board statement: This study is approved by the Ethics Committee of the Faculty of Medical Sciences, University of Kragujevac, No. 01-14321.
Informed consent statement: The data used for inputs and analysis were retrieved from the official database. Official data for deaths of suicide by hanging, strangulation and suffocation were obtained from the national statistical office (unpublished data). The data are fully aggregated, without any identification data. No patient approvals were sought nor required for this study. Our research question for estimating the trends of suicide mortality was based on the number of suicide mortality figures in Serbia from 1991 to 2020. However, as our model-based analysis used aggregated data, patients were not involved in the design, or conduct or reporting or dissemination plans of the research.
Conflict-of-interest statement: The authors have no conflicts of interest to declare.
Data sharing statement: No additional data are available.
STROBE statement: The authors have read the STROBE Statement–checklist of items, and the manuscript was prepared and revised according to the STROBE Statement–checklist of items.
Open-Access: This article is an open-access article that was selected by an in-house editor and fully peer-reviewed by external reviewers. It is distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: https://creativecommons.org/Licenses/by-nc/4.0/
Corresponding author: Milena Ilic, MD, PhD, Professor, Department of Epidemiology, Faculty of Medical Sciences, University of Kragujevac, S. Markovica 69, Kragujevac 34000, Serbia. drmilenailic@yahoo.com
Received: September 7, 2021
Peer-review started: September 7, 2021
First decision: November 8, 2021
Revised: November 18, 2021
Accepted: February 10, 2022
Article in press: February 10, 2022
Published online: March 19, 2022
Processing time: 191 Days and 16.5 Hours
Core Tip

Core Tip: Although scarce, previous research showed disparities in mortality trends of suicide by hanging across the world. The mortality trends of suicide by hanging decreased significantly in Serbia in the last three decades in both sexes together, but it was more pronounced in women than in men. In 2020, the age-standardized rate of mortality by hanging was 4.5 per 100000 persons in both sexes together (7.6 in males vs 1.7 in females), the male-to-female ratio was almost 5. Further research will allow a clarification of trends and help in a more effective suicide prevention.