THE ESSENTIAL
- About 200,000 suicide attempts result in contact with the healthcare system each year, according to the National Suicide Observatory. 11,200 people took their own lives between January 2020 and April 2021.
- In 2021, there were 23,791 emergency visits for suicidal gestures, compared to 17,333 in 2020. The overall number of people ending their lives has nevertheless tended to decrease since the mid-1980s, except among adolescents and young women.
A new study, conducted on more than 850,000 people, has shown that vitamin B9, also called folic acid, greatly reduces the risk of suicide. Researchers found that patients who were prescribed vitamin B9 committed 44% fewer suicide attempts and intentional self-harm than those who did not. This studypublished in JAMA Psychiatryconfirms the results of previous work on folic acid.
The researchers this time considered many possible confounders, including age, gender, mental health diagnoses, and more. Even following adjusting for each of the factors, vitamin B9 intake was still associated with a reduced risk of attempted suicide.
Vitamin B9: it might “save tens of thousands of lives”
Robert Gibbons, professor of biostatistics and medicine at the University of Chicago and lead author of the study, hopes the finding might improve suicide prevention efforts. “This might potentially save tens of thousands of lives, he said in a statement. There are no real side effects, it’s not very expensive, you can get it without a prescription.”
Vitamin B9 is particularly known to pregnant women since it is prescribed to them as soon as they plan a pregnancy in order to reduce the risk of malformation of the fetus. In fact, Professor Gibbons’ team initially believed that the surprising results of folic acid in reducing suicide attempts were due to the fact that pregnant women tend to have a lower suicide rate. However, they found exactly the same effect in men.
Suicidal behavior: “folic acid might be a safe treatment”
The researchers even observed that the longer a person took vitamin B9, the lower their risk of attempting suicide tended to be. During the 24 months of study follow-up, each month of vitamin B9 prescription was associated with an additional 5% decrease in the risk of attempted suicide.
The authors therefore speculated that, perhaps, people who take vitamins would, in general, have a desire to improve their health and would therefore be less likely to attempt suicide. To examine this hypothesis, they therefore performed a similar analysis with another dietary supplement, vitamin B12, as a control. But unlike folic acid, there does not appear to be a relationship between vitamin B12 and suicide risk.
If the results of this study are confirmed, “folic acid might be a safe, inexpensive, and widely available treatment for patients with suicidal ideation or behavior”the authors point out.