Citation

Arafat SMY, Kar SK, Menon V, Ransing RS, Karim AKMB. Psychiatr. Danub. 2021; 33(1): 69-71.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2021, Facultas Universitatis Studiorum Zagrabiensis - Danube Symposion of Psychiatry)

DOI

10.24869/psyd.2021.69

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

Suicide along with other forms of suicidal behavior (SB) is a preventable public health problem (World Health Organization 2014). SB is the end product of the complex interaction of diverse factors (Brundin et al. 2017). Although multiple risk factors have been identified precise estimation of risk has not been possible and a clear explanation of the neurobiology of SB is still lacking (Gibbs et al. 2016). A possible link with immune response has been postulated from clinical as well as epidemiological observations (Brundin et al. 2017). Thus, the identification of biomarkers of SB could be a potential option to estimate the risk precisely as well as to consider clinical steps to prevent suicides (Ganança et al. 2016). An accumulating body of evidence indicates that neuroinflammation plays a critical role in the pathobiology of suicidal behaviors (Mina et al. 2015). Increased neutrophil-lymphocyte ratio (NLR) has been suggested as a marker of low- grade systemic inflammation in psychiatric disorders and limited evidence points to increased NLR among suicide attempters with and without psychiatric morbidity compared to control group (Çakır et al. 2015). NLR is a convenient and cost-effective investigation compared to inflammatory markers and it may be relevant to investigate its utility further. We present a series of 4 cases of attempted suicide, both with and without psychiatric morbidity. In all of them, the NLR was elevated.

Language: en