Grant: Travel Awards - Institute Community Support

We studied 18,430 pairs of Ontario adults with and without chronic pain who were identified from the Canadian Community Health Survey from 2000-01, 2007-08 and 2009-10. We linked their survey responses to Ontario healthcare administrative data, for example, hospital stays, physician visits, publicly funded drugs, death records and others. Respondents were matched on age, sex, how far they lived from major urban areas and income. We followed them from survey response until death or December 31, 2013 and identified suicide attempts and suicide completions in the databases. We found more people with at least 1 suicide attempt in the chronic pain group (121 versus 61), and more suicide completions, using a broad definition that included intentional self harm, accidental poisoning and death of undetermined intent (35 versus 16). We found no statistical difference in suicide using the definition of intentional self-harm alone.