Vulnerability to suicide may be linked to a variety of early childhood factors including neurocognitive development, which is important because cognitive development shapes a person’s education level, socioeconomic status in adulthood, and more. Identifying early childhood risk factors can help inform programs to prevent suicide.
In a study led by Dr. Stephen Gilman in NICHD’s Social and Behavioral Sciences Branch, researchers explored whether there are indeed links between early childhood cognitive performance and suicide risk. The team used data from the Collaborative Perinatal Project, one of the largest pregnancy cohorts in the United States, which includes standardized intelligence tests and assessments of the children’s reading, spelling, and math skills.
The researchers found that children’s scores on neurocognitive tests with a verbal component were associated with suicide later in life. Specifically, high verbal intelligence acted as a protective factor against suicide, whereas low spelling and reading skills acted as a risk factor for suicide. Importantly, these associations were independent of sociodemographic and prenatal factors. The authors also noted that these trends were observed for children’s test scores at age 7 but not at age 4, suggesting that there’s a developmental variability in the role that cognitive ability has in suicide risk. They also found a larger association between low verbal scores and suicide risk among males when compared to females.
Overall, the findings provide a foundation for future research examining the role of neurocognitive development as it relates to age and gender in the context of suicide risk.
NICHD co-authors of the paper include Pablo Vidal-Ribas, Theemeshni Govender, Jing Yu, and Rajeshwari Sundaram.
Learn more about the Social and Behavioral Sciences Branch: https://www.nichd.nih.gov/about/org/dir/dph/officebranch/sbsb
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