A person's risk for suicide is influenced by many factors. How high this risk is, however, is difficult to determine. This makes it challenging to offer effective preventive measures and good treatment in the health services.
"We need a tool that can help clinicians make good decisions about which measures, and which treatment, will be most effective for each individual patient. Today there is no such tool", says Professor Ping Qin.
She is a professor at the National Centre for Suicide Research and Prevention (NSSF) at the University of Oslo and leads the universitys's contribution to the new EU project PERMANENS.
The project has received a total grant of EUR 1.22 million from research funding sources in the countries involved: Spain, Sweden, Ireland, and Norway. The Research Council of Norway allocated NOK 3 million to the project.
The aim of PERMANENS is to develop a tool for clinicians
The title of the project is "Towards Personalised Clinical Management of Suicide Risk through Data-Driven Clinical Decision Support using Transnational Registry Data".
The aim is to develop a medical software that will help clinicians in working with patients who have an increased risk of suicide. The software has been named Clinical Decision Support System (CDSS).
"The CDSS will be a tool that clinicians can use to detect patients with an increased risk of subsequent suicide. It will also evaluate which risk factors have the greatest influence for the individual patient", Qin says.
The tool will contribute to more personalised suicide prevention
The software will furthermore help clinicians decide the way forward based on the individual patient's risk profile. Which preventive measures would be most appropriate ones, and which treatment would the patient benefit most, from are questions it can help with.
In other words, the software will contribute to more personalised prevention and treatment of people at an increased risk for suicide.
"We know that clinicians make good judgments when working with individual patients, based on their professional knowledge and experience. However, we believe that it will also be useful to have a tool that can help clinicians make these decisions", the professor says.
More targeted prevention in clinical work with patients
Preventive work against suicide often consists of measures at the population level. Information campaigns and raising awareness about suicide risk are examples of such measures.
The new EU project, however, puts the spotlight on the prevention of suicide in people who receive treatment or are in contact with the healthcare system.
"We can prevent and treat suicidal thoughts and suicidal behaviour in a much more targeted way in clinical work with individuals, in addition to prevention at the population level. For example, this could involve people who receive treatment in hospital emergency departments because of deliberate self-harm or suicide attempts", Qin says.
Will use data from population registers in several European countries
In the project, the researchers will use data from population registries in Ireland, Sweden, Spain, and Norway. They will apply machine learning techniques to develop accurate and clinically useful prediction models, which can predict the risk of repeated self-harm and suicide mortality and identify the most important risk factors.
The models will form the basis for developing the CDSS software, which can predict the probable risk of suicide in individual patients.
"We are grateful for being able to get started with the development of this software. Our ultimate goal is that the CDSS software can be used in both national and regional healthcare institutions. It can enable personalised and timely delivery of effective treatment for suicidal behaviour at a large scale", Qin says.
Facts about the PERMANENS project
Coordinator of the project is Philippe Mortier, Health Services Research Group, Hospital del Mar Medical Research Institute (IMIM), Spain
In addition to Ping Qin at NSSF at UiO, Ella Arensman at the National Suicide Research Foundation & School of Public Health at University College Cork in Ireland, Manuel Pastor at MELIS – PharmacoInformatics Research Group – Research Program on Biomedical Informatics (GRIB) at Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Spain and Johan Bjureberg at the Department of Clinical Neuroscience (CNS) at the Karolinska Institutet in Sweden are project leaders.
Professor Lars Mehlum from NSSF, UiO is also part of the project.
UiO's contribution is financed by the Research Council of Norway through the International Joint Programmes. This is a scheme for Norwegian project participants who have received a decision on funding in European, Nordic, and other international joint programmes and where the RCN finances the Norwegian participant's project costs.