Combining scales to assess suicide risk.
OBJECTIVE
A major interest in the assessment of suicide risk is to develop an accurate instrument, which could be easily adopted by clinicians. This article aims at identifying the most discriminative items from a collection of scales usually employed in the assessment of suicidal behavior.


METHODS
The answers to the Barrat Impulsiveness Scale, International Personality Disorder Evaluation Screening Questionnaire, Brown-Goodwin Lifetime History of Aggression, and Holmes & Rahe Social Readjustment Rating Scale provided by a group of 687 subjects (249 suicide attempters, 81 non-suicidal psychiatric inpatients, and 357 healthy controls) were used by the Lars-en algorithm to select the most discriminative items.


RESULTS
We achieved an average accuracy of 86.4%, a specificity of 89.6%, and a sensitivity of 80.8% in classifying suicide attempters using 27 out of the 154 items from the original scales.


CONCLUSIONS
The 27 items reported here should be considered a preliminary step in the development of a new scale evaluating suicidal risk in settings where time is scarce.
Department of Psychiatry, Puerta de Hierro Hospital, CIBERSAM, Calle Manuel de Falla 1, 28222 Majadahonda, Spain. hmblasco@yahoo.es
Hilario
H
Blasco-Fontecilla
David
D
Delgado-Gomez
Diego
D
Ruiz-Hernandez
David
D
Aguado
Enrique
E
Baca-Garcia
Jorge
J
Lopez-Castroman
D000328:Adult; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D001523:Mental Disorders / Q000453:epidemiology / Q000523:psychology*; D008875:Middle Aged; D016011:Normal Distribution; D010555:Personality Inventory; D012372:ROC Curve; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D016728:Self-Injurious Behavior / Q000175:diagnosis* / Q000523:psychology; D013405:Suicide / Q000523:psychology* / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires; D055815:Young Adult