The study simultaneously checked each medicine for links to rising and falling suicide attempt rates. Surprisingly, medications known to increase the risk of suicide, such as antidepressants, anxiolytics, and antipsychotics, as well as folic acid were linked to a lower chance of suicide attempts.
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When people were on prescription folic acid, their likelihood of being treated for self-harm or suicide attempt dropped by 44%, a recent study found.[/caption]
This prior study faced a number of difficulties, including the challenging task of analyzing the effects of numerous medicines in a sizable data set. Drugs can have distinct effects when taken combined compared to those taken alone, and many people take more than one drug.
Confounding variables, which can make two study variables, such as suicide and a drug, appear to have a direct causal relationship with one another, can make it challenging to obtain relevant results from studies like these that search for relationships in huge data sets.
Sometimes, they are actually connected to a confounding factor that is related to both of them, such as socioeconomic level or health-conscious attitudes, or they are taken for a condition that is linked to suicide (e.g. depression).
Instead of comparing patients who did and did not take the treatment to one another, Gibbons and his team were able to partially minimize these problems by comparing subjects to themselves before and after they were administered a drug.
They actually believed that the only reason folic acid appeared in their study was due to a straightforward explanation, but it turned out that wasn't the case.