Connecting the Opioid Crisis to Juvenile Suicide Attempts

Might the well-known increase in opioid use be correlated with an equally alarming increase in child and adolescent suicide rates? These researchers used prescription and diagnostic data from 6 years of claims (>100 American insurers covering 146 million lives) to compare offspring of parents who used prescription opioids for at least a year with children of parents with no opioid use (121,306 matched parent pairs; 332,537 children aged 10–19).

Offspring suicide attempts were correlated with histories of depression and substance use disorder (SUD) and with parental histories of suicide attempts, depression, and SUD. In analyses controlling for these factors, parental opioid use increased the likelihood of a child's suicide attempt by 45%. Th…