Original ArticlesAdolescent suicide and household access to firearms in Colorado: results of a case-control study
Section snippets
Methods
Case subjects were identified using death certificates and were defined as any Colorado resident <18 years of age who committed suicide with a firearm in Colorado between 1991 and 1993. A letter soliciting participation in the study was mailed to the parent or guardian at least 6 months after the date of death. If the parent or guardian did not return a form declining participation in the study, he or she was contacted by telephone to complete a questionnaire. In cases where there was more than
Results
Ninety-seven Colorado residents <18 years of age committed suicide between 1991 and 1993. Of those, 17 of their families could not be located. Of the 80 families who were contacted, 21 refused to participate in the study. For five of the remaining 59 suicides, a suitable control could not be located. This was because certain schools which had been attended by case adolescents were not willing to participate in the study and identify a suitable control from the same school. Excluding adolescents
Discussion
Although household firearm access was prevalent in both the case (72%) and control (50%) groups in this study, adolescents who committed suicide by firearms were significantly more likely to have a firearm in their home than were age- and sex-matched school controls. These findings are consistent with the findings in a case-control study by Brent et al. (14), who found household access to firearms to be a risk factor for all types of adolescent suicide. In an effort to build upon that study, we
Acknowledgements
The authors thank Sue Dunn and Sallie Thoreson for the many hours they spent interviewing the families to collect the data for this study, Dr. Dennis Lezotte for his assistance with the statistical analysis, and Dr. Patrick O’Carroll for his assistance developing the survey instrument used in this study. This work was partially funded by a grant from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Injury Prevention and Control (Grant U17/CCU811122), and by Preventive
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