Suicide among patients with cancer: a call to action for researchers and clinical caregivers

Abstract

For a patient, the diagnosis of cancer represents a life-changing event and inherently causes severe psychosocial distress, which under certain unfavourable circumstances may result in suicidal ideations and suicidal action. In addition to the primary diagnosis, a number of related factors such as anxiety, pain, fatigue, loss of perspectives, treatment-related adverse events and lack of coping strategies may induce suicidal thoughts and behaviors. 1 Suicides are a huge burden for family members, friends, as well as caregivers and society as a whole to cope with, as the loss of a beloved person goes far beyond the sole clinical case of a cancer patient. A recent comprehensive systematic review and meta-analysis quantified the increased suicide mortality among cancer patients compared to the general population and identified a series of relevant risk factors. 2 Summarizing 62 studies including 46 952 813 patients revealed an almost twofold elevated suicide mortality rate among cancer patients and identified poor prognosis, late cancer stage, the first year after diagnosis and living in the US as high risk factors, while intermediate prognosis, early cancer stage and non-sex-specific cancers were reported as intermediate-level risk factors. 2 The highest suicide mortality risk was identified for patients with cancer suffering from a poor prognosis, with a more than 3.5-fold increased suicide risk compared to the This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.