FC13-05 - Is african ancestry a protective factor against suicide?

Abstract

Suicide officially is causing approximately 30,000 deaths annually in the United States. Despite persisting socioeconomic and health disparities, African-Americans register suicide rates less than half that of Whites.

This cross-sectional genetic study uses a sample of schizophrenia patients evaluated for presence of lifetime suicide attempt to assess whether African Ancestry self-reported and determined using informative SNP markers were associated with suicide attempt. Subjects were 233 White, African-American and Asian psychotic patients, whose suicidal behaviour was recorded at the time of the SCID.

The African-American ancestry was estimated using the program STRUCTURE 2.1 using 102 HapMap markers across the genome including subjects from the HapMap Phase 3 in the analysis as reference populations. There were 51 suicide attempters and 182 non-attempters in the sample the estimated African ancestry considering three genetic clusters (k = 3) was 23% in the attempters and 24% in the non-attempters. This difference was not significant (p = 0.635). Genetic data disparities might not explain much of the Black-White suicide rate gap. This simple studys support the hypothesis that different rate in suicide between African-Americans and White Caucasians are due to cultural and social difference rather than genetic difference.