Biography: Dr Ping Qin is professor at National Center for Suicide Research and Prevention, University of Oslo in Norway, and head of research group for register-based study on suicide and self-harm. Professor Qin has been dedicated to reseach on suicide prevention and psychiatric epidemiology for more than 25 years, with extensive experience in population studies with data from longitudinal registries, previously in Denmark and since 2012 in Norway. Her main focus of research has been quantitative investigation on contextual influence of multifactorial exposures on risk for suicidal behavior and follow-up care for people with deliberate self-harm. She has led a number of international collaboration projects. She is the co-chair of 2021 IASR/AFSP International Summit on Suicide Reseach, a founding co-chair of the Special Interest Group on Suicide and Self-harm in Middle-aged Adults, and past Vice-President of International Association for Suicide Prevention.
More information about Dr. Qin may be accessed here.
Suicide Prevention Research: Searching Evidence from Real-life Data in Routine Registers
Abstract: Routine population registries offer extensive opportunities for research because the data is recorded uniformly, precisely and longitudinally, and often covers a large population. The registries allow research on children as well as adults, enable follow-up of individual subjects beyond the limited time span, and ensure cost-efficient and easy access to data of both common and rare exposures. Starting from the Nordic countries and increasingly more from other parts of the world, a range of studies have used this valuable source of data to search for meaningful evidence on factors contributing to suicide and suicide prevention. The studies have been able to include a great variety of social and health-related factors to study their contextual effect on risk for suicide and deliberate self-harm, to disentangle contributing effects of specific exposures, to examine interactive effects of multiple exposures, and to assess the effect of clinical treatments and inventions. In this lecture I will discuss strengths and limitations in utilizing register data for suicide research, and present important findings from our group. Emphases will go to investigation on temporal, contextual and interactive effects of socioeconomic disadvantages, adverse experiences and psychiatric and physical illnesses, and on what follow-up psychiatric care was delivered to patients presenting to hospitals with deliberate self-harm and what effect it had on the patients’ health prospectively.
