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. Author manuscript; available in PMC: 2018 Oct 1.
Published in final edited form as: Suicide Life Threat Behav. 2016 Nov 1;47(5):589–602. doi: 10.1111/sltb.12307

Table 1.

Characteristics of Regular Army enlisted suicide attempters, ideators, and decedents who completed neurocognitive testing, versus controls.1

Cases
Controls
(N = 9,893)		 Suicide Attempters
(N = 607)		 Suicide Ideators
(N = 955)		 Suicide Decedents
(N = 57)
N % N % χ2 N % χ2 N % χ2
Gender 30.11* 4.51* 3.55
  Female 874 8.8 92 15.2 103 10.8 1 1.8
  Male 9,019 91.2 515 84.8 852 89.2 56 98.2
Age at testing 129.40* 72.08* 11.19*
  17–20 1,499 15.2 171 28.2 215 22.5 13 22.8
  21–24 3,404 34.4 250 41.2 358 37.5 17 29.8
  25–29 2,481 25.1 114 18.8 232 24.3 20 35.1
  30–34 1,261 12.7 39 6.4 75 7.9 1 1.8
  35–39 850 8.6 23 3.8 51 5.3 3 5.3
  40+ 398 4.0 10 1.6 24 2.5 3 5.3
Education 101.07* 148.44* 1.15
  < High School2 1,696 17.1 195 32.1 301 31.5 10 17.5
  High School 7,445 75.3 387 63.8 619 64.8 43 75.4
  Some College 395 4.0 17 2.8 20 2.1 1 1.8
  College+ 357 3.6 8 1.3 15 1.6 3 5.3
Race 13.12* 17.69* 4.78
  White 6,519 65.9 440 72.5 690 72.3 44 77.2
  Black 1,641 16.6 80 13.2 126 13.2 8 14.0
  Hispanic 1,190 12.0 64 10.5 96 9.9 2 3.5
  Asian 377 3.8 14 2.3 32 3.4 2 3.5
  Other 166 1.7 9 1.5 11 1.2 1 1.8
Mental health diagnosis
prior to testing3 		152.21* 291.04* 8.51*
  Yes 2,647 26.8 297 48.9 489 51.2 25 43.9
  No 7,246 73.2 310 51.1 466 48.8 32 56.1
1

Case-control sample includes enlisted Regular Army enlisted soldiers (i.e., excluding officers and members of the U.S. Army National Guard and Army Reserve) on active duty during the years 2004–2009. Cases are the subset of soldiers who completed neurocognitive testing prior to their first administratively documented suicide attempt. Controls are soldiers who completed the neurocognitive testing prior to their sampled person-month record, representing a subset of a 1:200 stratified probability sample of all active duty Regular Army person-months in the population, exclusive of soldiers with a non-fatal suicidal behavior and all person-months involving a death (i.e., due to suicide, combat, homicide, injury, or illness). All records in the 1:200 control sample were assigned a weight of 200 to adjust for the under-sampling of months not associated with a suicidal behavior.

2

< High School includes: General Educational Development credential (GED), home study diploma, occupational program certificate, correspondence school diploma, high school certificate of attendance, adult education diploma, and other non-traditional high school credentials.

3

Mental health diagnosis prior to testing was determined based on ICD-9 mental disorder codes (Appendix B).

4

Based on throughput scores from the Army’s Automated Neuropsychological Assessment Metrics (ANAM) battery.

*

p < 0.05, two-tailed.