Temporal Association Between Airborne Pollen and Suicide Attempts: Dallas County 2000--2003 Data

• Activity Number: 295
• Type: Contributed
• Date/Time: Tuesday, August 5, 2014 : 8:30 AM to 10:20 AM
• Sponsor: Health Policy Statistics Section
• Author(s): Haekyung Jeon-Slaughter*+ and Cindy Claassen and David Kahn and Perry Mihalakos and Kevin Lee and Sherwood Brown
• Companies: University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center and University of North Texas Health Science Center and University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center and University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center and Palo Alto HCS Veteran Affairs - Menlo Park Division and University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center
• Keywords: Suicide attempts ; Pollen ; GARCH ; time series model

Abstract

Suicide seasonality is well documented phenomenon with its peak in spring. One possible underlying mechanism that explains suicide seasonality is change in airborne pollen counts. Suicides count for a small portion of suicide attempters, and who are still alive, thus, suicide attempter data would lead to prospective studies that examine biomarkers and risk factors in attempters and help understand underlying mechanisms. This study examines a serial correlation between pollen levels and suicide attempts using suicide attempter data extracted from emergency room medical records in Parkland Memorial hospital in Dallas, Texas between January 2000 and December 2003. Daily airborne tree, grass, and ragweed pollen data in the Dallas area during the same period were extracted from online database of National Allergy Bureau. Non-constant Generalized AutoRegressive Conditional Heteroskedasticity (GARCH) model was used to examine change in pollen count relation to numbers of suicide attempts. Numbers of female suicide attempts at t were positively associated with tree pollen counts at t and t-1 and suicide attempts at t by both genders were positively associated with grass pollen levels at t.