Occurrence and recurrence of attempted suicide among people with epilepsy.

Objectives To estimate the magnitude of the association between attempted suicide and epilepsy by comparing a first suicide attempt and a second suicide attempt (hereafter referred to as a recurrent suicide attempt) among people before they received a diagnosis of epilepsy (case patients) with a first suicide attempt and a recurrent suicide attempt among people without epilepsy (control patients), and to evaluate the effect of comorbid psychiatric disorders and the exclusion of antiepileptic drug prescriptions on this association. Suicide attempts and recurrent suicide attempts are associated with epilepsy even before epilepsy manifests, suggesting a common underlying biology. Our findings indicate that both incident and recurrent suicide attempts are associated with incident epilepsy in the absence of antiepileptic drugs and in the absence of diagnosed psychiatric disorders, further strengthening the evidence for a common underlying etiology with an as-yet-unknown mechanism.

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