Background: Suicidal behavior is highly familial. Neurocognitive deficits have been proposed as an endophenotype for suicide risk that may contribute to the familial transmission of suicide. Yet, there is a lack of research on the neurocognitive functioning of first-degree biological relatives of suicide attempters. The aim of the present study is to conduct the largest investigation to date of neurocognitive functioning in community youth with a family history of a fatal or nonfatal suicide attempt (FH).
Methods: Participants aged 8-21 years from the Philadelphia Neurodevelopmental Cohort completed detailed clinical and neurocognitive evaluations. A subsample of 501 participants with a FH was matched to a comparison group of 3,006 participants without a family history of suicide attempt (no-FH) on age, sex, race, and lifetime depression.
Results: After adjusting for multiple comparisons and including relevant clinical and demographic covariates, youth with a FH had significantly lower executive function factor scores (F[1,3432] = 6.63, p = .010) and performed worse on individual tests of attention (F[1,3382] = 7.08, p = .008) and language reasoning (F[1,3387] = 5.12, p = .024) than no-FH youth.
Conclusions: Youth with a FH show small differences in executive function, attention, and language reasoning compared to youth without a FH. Further research is warranted to investigate neurocognitive functioning as an endophenotype for suicide risk. Implications for the prevention and treatment of suicidal behaviors are discussed.
Keywords: Family history; cognition; endophenotype; suicide.
© 2020 Association for Child and Adolescent Mental Health.