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Geospatial clustering of suicide mortality in Sardinia

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Abstract

The Mediterranean island of Sardinia shows the highest suicide rate in Italy among men (23.07 × 105 per year vs the average national rate of 13.80 × 105 per year). In contrast, the suicide rate among Sardinian women is one of the lowest across all the Italian regions. The aim of this epidemiological study was to investigate the distribution of suicide mortality in Sardinia in relation with environmental and social factors using geospatial analysis. Data available from the total 377 Sardinian municipalities, including suicidal mortality and several socio-economic indicators, were retrieved and analysed. Ordinary least squares regression was used to investigate the association between suicide mortality and the selected indicators. Suicides among men reached a peak in the Southern-Eastern area of the island. Overall, the multivariable analysis showed that suicidal mortality was significantly and positively related with the altitude (0.243, P = 0.001), the occupational hardship index (0.230, P = 0.016), and the social services hardship index (0.149, P < 0.0001), and negatively with pro-capita income (‒0.122, P = 0.012). After adjusting for all covariates, the index of multiple deprivation, the environmental and the educational index respectively, remained the only significant predictors. These findings suggest that social distress is the main factor leading to suicide among Sardinia men.

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Data availability

The datasets generated during and/or analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Medical, Surgical and Experimental Sciences, University of Sassari, Sassari, Italy

    Liliana Lorettu, Alessandra Nivoli, Davide Piu, Maria Pina Dore & Giovanni M. Pes

  2. Geneva, Switzerland

    Saverio Bellizzi

  3. University of Sassari, Sassari, Italy

    Roberta Meloni

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  1. Liliana Lorettu
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  2. Alessandra Nivoli
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Correspondence to Saverio Bellizzi.

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Ethics approval and consent to participate were not required, as this is an observational study based on anonymized data routinely collected by the ISTAT, which is a public Italy bodies reporting on health and socio economic determinants (according to Italian law, the study was exempted from approval by an ethics committee because all the data used were deidentified and publicly available). This study is also ethically compliant with the National Law (D.Lgs. 101/2018) and the “General Authorisation to Process Personal Data for Scientific Research Purposes” (nos. 8 and 9 of 2016, referred to in the Data Protection Authority action of December 13, 2018).

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Lorettu, L., Nivoli, A., Bellizzi, S. et al. Geospatial clustering of suicide mortality in Sardinia. Curr Psychol 42, 11556–11564 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-021-02448-2

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