Over 45,000 people will commit suicide in the US in 2020, making it one of the major causes of death.
Experts offer several measures and therapies to lower the risk of suicide, including psychotherapy, peer support, economic support, and drugs like antidepressants.
Supplements containing folic acid are unlikely to be included on that list by many people, but a recent study from the University of Chicago may change that.
The study, which included information from 866,586 patients’ health insurance claims, was released on September 28th and examined the association between folic acid therapy and suicide attempts over a two-year period.
They discovered that individuals who took folic acid, generally known as vitamin B9, as prescribed saw a 44% decrease in suicidal incidents (suicide attempts and intentional self-harm).
Lead author of the study and Blum-Riese Professor of Biostatistics and Medicine at the University of Chicago, Robert Gibbons, Ph.D., is optimistic that these findings may enhance efforts to prevent suicide, particularly given how widely available folic acid is.
“There are no real side effects, it doesn’t cost a lot of money, you can get it without a prescription,” Gibbons said. “This could potentially save tens of thousands of lives.”
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.
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.
