If parent attempted suicide, kids may try, too............

Suicide attempt by a parent increased the odds nearly five-fold that a child would attempt suicide, too, according to a latest study.

While mood disorders play a role in a person's risk of attempting suicide, the study's lead author said there are other factors that need to be explored and explained.

Previous studies have discovered that people with a family history of suicide attempts are at increased risk for suicide attempts, too. Those studies indicated a family history of mood disorders as the reason, but they only followed participants for one or two years, Brent and his coauthors note.

The team followed the children of people with mood disorders for a longer period to examine the possible connections between parental suicide attempts, the offspring's suicide attempts and mood disorders.

Between 1997 and 2012, 701 people between the ages of 10 and 50 were followed for 6 years each. The study participants were the children of 334 people with mood disorders, 191 of whom had made a suicide attempt.

It was found that 6 percent of the participants reported a suicide attempt before they entered the study and about 4 percent made an attempt while enrolled.

According to the study, which has been published in JAMA Psychiatry, children of the people who reported suicide attempts were about five times more likely to attempt taking their own lives.

While accounting for mood disorders reduced the magnitude of the increased risk related with the parent's attempt, the children still had a four-fold greater likelihood of attempting suicide.

The trait of impulsive aggression, which has been associated with suicidality, may explain the offspring's suicide risk, but it didn't. Instead, impulsive aggression predicted the presence of mood disorders, which in turn partly explained the increased suicide risk.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), about 1 million American adults, or 0.5 percent of the U.S. adult population, report having made a suicide attempt within the last year.

The CDC also says that among young people ages 15 to 24, there are 100 to 200 suicide attempts for every one completed suicide.