Regional Disparities of Suicide Mortality by Gender

Seo, Eun Won; Kwak, Jin Mi; Kim, Da Yang; Lee, Kwang Soo

Abstract

BACKGROUND
Suicide is one of important health problems in Korea. Previous studies showed factors associated with suicide in individual levels. However, suicide was influenced by society that individuals belong to, so it was required to analyze suicide in local levels. The purpose of this study was to analyze the regional disparities of suicide mortality by gender and the association between local characteristics and suicide mortality.
METHODS
This study included 229 city.county.district administrative districts in Korea. Age- and sex-standardized suicide mortality and age-standardized suicide mortality (male/female) were used as dependent variables. City.county.district types, socio-demographics (number of divorces per 1,000 population, number of marriages per 1,000 population, and single households), financial variable (financial independence), welfare variable (welfare budget), and health behavior/status (perceived health status scores and EuroQol-5 dimension [EQ-5D]) were used to represent the local characteristics. We used hot-spot analysis to identify the spatial patterns of suicide mortality and negative binomial regression analysis to examine factors affecting suicide mortality.
RESULTS
There were differences in distribution of suicide mortality and hot-spot regions of suicide mortality by gender. Negative binomial regression analysis provided that city.county.district types (city), number of divorces per 1,000 population, financial independence, and EQ-5D had significant influences on the age- and sex-standardized suicide mortality per 100,000. Factor influencing suicide mortality was the number of divorces per 1,000 population in both male and female.
CONCLUSION
Study results provided evidences that suicide mortality among regions was differed by gender. Health policy makers will need to consider gender and local characteristics when making policies for suicides.