Advancing Research to Prevent Youth Suicide: Next Steps

In 2016 the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Office of Disease Prevention (ODP) held a Pathways to Prevention (P2P) workshop “Advancing Research to Prevent Youth Suicide.” The workshop was co-sponsored by NIH ODP, the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), and the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (NCCIH). An Evidence-based Practice Center prepared an evidence report that addressed data systems relevant to suicide prevention efforts through a contract with the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. A final report was completed that considered the data from the evidence report, expert presentations, and public comments. The report provides a roadmap for optimizing youth suicide prevention efforts by highlighting strategies for guiding the next decade of research on youth suicide. Strategies include recommendations for improving data systems, enhancing data collection and analysis methods, and strengthening research and community practice. The goal of this roundtable is to gather input from attendees regarding the report recommendation on integrating and linking data across studies: “Integrative data analysis uses a set of common measures across two or more studies to link the data. These linked studies can be combined as an integrated data set that allows greater overall power to identify hard-to-detect mediating and moderating mechanisms, as well as greater representation of suicides, which are infrequent in any given study or setting. Including common measures and linking items across projects, coupled with principled treatment of the missing data, would expand the power and validity of the larger research portfolio sponsored by funding agencies.” The roundtable will also discuss process and research challenges including intervention harmonization, the need for data dictionaries and adherence to standard data elements. An action step taken by NIMH in response to the evidence was a Request for Information, “Guidance for Opportunities in Suicide Research Using Existing Datasets.” Responses to this request will be described with regard to 1) existing research data sets that could be further shared and analyzed to refine knowledge of risk and protective factors and intervention effectiveness; and 2) linking of mortality data to various clinical, educational, and contextual (e.g., census related) data. This roundtable offers additional opportunity for the prevention research community to discuss the challenges of sharing and integrating existing prevention trials to optimize suicide prevention.