Archival ReportBrain Correlates of Suicide Attempt in 18,925 Participants Across 18 International Cohorts
Section snippets
Samples
We analyzed pooled data (mega-analysis) across 17 ENIGMA-MDD Working Group cohorts with clinical and neuroimaging data available for participants fulfilling MDD criteria (33) (n = 2533) and healthy control subjects (n = 4066) and participants from the UK Biobank (n = 12,366). We defined three groups: suicide attempters; clinical control subjects, that is, participants with depression and no history of suicide attempt; and healthy control subjects. Descriptive statistics for each sample are
Suicide Attempt Prevalence and Sample Demographics
Details on the sample of each cohort included in this analysis are summarized in Table 1 and Table S1. Notably, not all cohorts had cases of suicide attempt, but still contributed data to the healthy or clinical control groups. The pooled mean age (SD) was 56.22 (15.17) years. Differences in age and sex composition across cohorts were detected (Table S1) and used as covariates for all the analyses. The total sample size comprised 18,925 subjects, of which 3.67% (n = 694) had at least one past
Discussion
This study addressed the lack of statistical power, which may have resulted in low replicability and consistency, in previous neuroimaging studies of suicide attempt. Our analyses revealed four regions associated explicitly with suicide attempt, above and beyond the effect of MDD, supporting the hypothesis of suicidality-associated neural differences (30). The relatively few regions identified and the overall small effect sizes should be taken as a warning for future studies attempting to
Acknowledgments and Disclosures
The work reported here was supported in part by many public and private agencies across the world. Core funding for ENIGMA was provided by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Big Data to Knowledge (BD2K) program (Consortium Grant No. U54 EB020403 [to PMT]), the University Medical Center Göttingen and the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (Bundesministerium fuer Bildung und Forschung, BMBF: 01 ZX 1507, ‘‘PreNeSt - e:Med’’ [to AFFDIS]), as well by support to the BiDirect study
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