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Is there a relationship between elderly suicide rates and educational attainment?

April 26, 2017Attainment educational elderly rates relationship suicide

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Is there a relationship between elderly suicide rates and educational attainment?

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GROUND: Suicides are associated with both high and low levels of intelligence and educational attainment in both individual-level and aggregate-level studies, but this has been rarely studied in the elderly. METHODS: A cross-national study examining the relationship between elderly suicide rates (y-axis) and educational attainment (x-axis) was undertaken with the ‘a priori’ hypothesis that the relationship would be curvilinear and follow a U-shaped curve with the quadratic equation Y = A + BX + CX(2), where A, B and C are constants. Data on suicide rates for both sexes in the age-bands 65-74 years and 75+ years, and the Education Index (a proxy measure of educational attainment) were ascertained from the World Health Organisation and the United Nations websites, respectively. RESULTS: The main finding was the predicted curvilinear relationship between suicide rates, in both sexes in both the elderly age-bands, and the Education Index fitting the quadratic equation Y = A + BX + CX(2). C