P9: Clinical and Sociodemographic Factors Associated with Suicidal Risk in Older Adults in Latin America

Abstract

Introduction:

Suicidal behaviors represent a serious public health problem in terms of mortality, morbidity and social impact. Suicide in the elderly is a statistical reality little studied in the Latin American context. Method: It´s an observational study where we reviewed the records of the patients seen between January 2018 and December 2019 at the Psychogeriatrics Clinic of the Ramón de la Fuente Muñiz National Institute of Psychiatry; collecting sociodemographic, clinical information and evaluating the suicidal risk by the SAD PERSONS Scale. With the information obtained, we correlated variables with suicidal risk based on the Pearson and Spearman correlation indices.

Results:

A total of 404 files were reviewed, finding that in the last 5 years 1.4% of the patients had made a suicide attempt, what was directly related to a history of violence (r=0.256, p=0.011). Suicidal thoughts in the past year (15.4%) and increased suicidal risk were associated with PAS use (r=0.123, p=0.037) (r=0.207, p=0.001) and depressive disorder (r=0.148, p=0.012) (r=0.27, p=0.000).

Conclusions:

In the older adult population, some of the clinical and sociodemographic factors associated with suicidal risk described for the general population could continue to be considered risk factors, among them: being male, low level of education, diagnosis of depressive disorder, having medical comorbidities and the use of SPA.