Variable Classification of Drug-Intoxication Suicides across US States: A Partial Artifact of Forensics?
Variable Classification of Drug-Intoxication Suicides across US States: A Partial Artifact of Forensics?
复制标题
DOI:
10.1371/journal.pone.0135296
复制
发表时间:
2015-08-21
期刊:
影响因子:
3.7
通讯作者:
Caine, Eric D.
中科院分区:
文献类型:
--
作者:
Rockett, Ian R. H.;Hobbs, Gerald R.;Caine, Eric D.
BackgroundThe 21st-century epidemic of pharmaceutical and other drug-intoxication deaths in the United States (US) has likely precipitated an increase in misclassified, undercounted suicides. Drug-intoxication suicides are highly prone to be misclassified as accident or undetermined. Misclassification adversely impacts suicide and other injury mortality surveillance, etiologic understanding, prevention, and hence clinical and public health policy formation and practice.ObjectiveTo evaluate whether observed variation in the relative magnitude of drug-intoxication suicides across US states is a partial artifact of the scope and quality of toxicological testing and type of medicolegal death investigation system.MethodsThis was a national, state-based, ecological study of 111,583 drug-intoxication fatalities, whose manner of death was suicide, accident, or undetermined. The proportion of (nonhomicide) drug-intoxication deaths classified by medical examiners and coroners as suicide was analyzed relative to the proportion of death certificates citing one or more specific drugs and two types of state death investigation systems. Our model incorporated five sociodemographic covariates. Data covered the period 2008-2010, and derived from NCHS's Multiple Cause-of-Death public use files.ResultsAcross states, the proportion of drug-intoxication suicides ranged from 0.058 in Louisiana to 0.286 in South Dakota and the rate from 1 per 100,000 population in North Dakota to 4 in New Mexico. There was a low correlation between combined accident and undetermined drug-intoxication death rates and corresponding suicide rates (Spearman's rho =0.38; p