Thursday, June 18, 2009

Moving house and suicide

People move around a lot these days and about 50% of children have moved house at least once before their 10th birthday. It can be very difficult to change schools and move away from friends and some children may even be at risk of suicide. There have been few studies into this link so researchers at the University of Aarhus in Denmark studied 128,960 children to look into this issue. They found that the more frequently the children moved the higher their risk of suicide was. This held true even after allowing for other factors such as birth order, birthplace, links to a father and paternal age at birth.

Qin, Ping, Mortensen, Prehen Bo and Pedersen, Carsten Becker - Frequent change of residence and risk of attempted and completed suicide among children and adolescents Archives of General Psychiatry June 2009, 66(6), 628-632

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