Introduction:

Suicidal ideation and attempts are strongly predictive of suicide deaths. Furthermore, suicide attempts exert a financial burden of millions of dollars on society.

Objective:

To establish the factors associated with more than one suicide attempt in the Colombian population that was reported in 2016.

Methods:

A cross-sectional study of 18,763 reports entered in the database of the National Public Health Surveillance of the National Institute of Health of Colombia during 2016 was performed.

Results:

11,738 (62.6%) of the total number of reports were female, the mean age was 25.0 (95% CI, 24.9-25.2) years, 46% of all cases were individuals between 10- and 20-years-old; 5,734 (30.6%) reported 2 or more suicide attempts and the prevalence of a mental disorder and persistent suicidal ideation were 48.5% and 16.4%, respectively. The factor most strongly associated with more than one suicide attempt, after adjusting for logistic regression, was persistent suicide ideation with crude OR = 5.5 (95% CI, 5.0-5.9), and ORa = 4.0 (95% CI, 3.6-4.3).

Conclusions:

Patients with persistent suicidal ideation were 4 times more likely to have 2 or more suicide attempts. Other factors such as the use of a sharp weapon as a mechanism to perform the attempt and the history of bipolar affective disorder and/or depression were also associated with more than one suicide attempt.

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