[Suicide rates, suicide methods and uncertain cause of death in the elderly]

The incidence of suicidal behavior among elderly people is difficult to determine, as it is probable that many suicides in this age group escape detection. This is attributable to the high incidence of "indirect" suicidal acts and the difficulty of detecting suicidal poisoning among elderly people, because deaths involving such methods are especially liable to be mistakenly classified under other categories of causes of death. Using the available statistics that record the causes of death for persons aged over 60 years in the Federal Republic of Germany, we examined co-variations between suicide figures and the occurrence of other categories of causes of death. The suicide rates exhibited a progressive increase with age for such age groups as a whole. However, the trends observed for individual 5-year age groups differentiated according to sex showed considerable differences, with the suicide figures increasing for some groups, but decreasing for others. Furthermore, these alterations were also found to be substantially dependent on the time periods selected. In general, the male/female suicide ratio altered to the disadvantage of women; increase in the suicide figures for women over 60 years exceeded the growth in the proportion of the population accounted for by this group. The latest available figures indicate that women over 60 years now commit 48% of all female suicides.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)