PhD Scientific Days 2022

Mental Health Sciences I. (Poster discussion will take place in the Aula during the Coffee Break)

The long-term risk of suicide in children and adolescents with attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder – a systematic review

Text of the abstract

Introduction
The attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is one of the most common mental disorder in childhood. Recently several studies showed the high suicide risk of patients with ADHD, however most of these research, including our group’s previous study had cross-sectional design.
Aims
The aim of my PhD research is to investigate the suicide risk of ADHD patients in a follow-up study. As a first step we completed a systematic review of the available data of the already published studies with longitudinal design.
Method
The systematic search was made on OVID Medline, PsycInfo, PubMed, Scopus and Web of Science. The search terms were (ADHD OR attention deficit hyperactivity disorder) AND (suicide OR suicidal OR suicidality) AND (follow-up OR longitudinal study OR prospective study). Inclusion criteria were: written in English; participants under 18 years at the baseline; longitudinal, prospective studies; ADHD population at the baseline and at the follow-up; suicide behavior as primer outcome. Exclusion criteria were: the study did not contain empirical data, reviews/metaanalyses and studies which aimed to investigate the drug treatment efficacy of ADHD. The titles and the abstracts of the articles were screened at first. After the relevant full texts of papers that passed were read, and the ones that met the inclusion criteria were collected. The reference lists of the retrieved papers were screened.
Results
After the screening process finally 17 papers were included in the systematic review. Altogether 11 of the investigated 28 articles were published in the last 5 years, the range of the follow-up periods varied between 3.9 and 20.0 years. In the 17 studies several different assessment tools were used to investigate the symptoms and/or the diagnosis of ADHD and the suicidal risk. Eight studies enrolled children aged under 12 at baseline, six studies birth cohort data and there were no strict age-based inclusion criteria. 16 studies found a positive association between ADHD diagnosis at baseline and the presence of suicidal behavior and/or attempts at the follow up visits.
Conclusions
The results highlight the importance of screening suicidality in long term in patents with ADHD, however further studies are needed, which compare in long-term the suicidal risk of treated and untreated groups of ADHD patents .