Prevalence of suicide attempts among college students in China: a meta-analysis

Suicide is the leading cause of death among 15-34 year olds in China, but no national data are available on the suicide and suicide attempts rates of college students, a sub-group of youth with 23 million. Several studies have reported the prevalence of suicide attempts among college students, however, no meta-analysis pooling the prevalence of suicide attempts is found. This study aims to estimate the pooled prevalence of suicide attempts among college students in China. The relevant studies up to August 2014 were systematically searched via electronic databases (PubMed-Medline, Embase, Chinese Wanfang database, Chinese National Knowledge Infrastructure and Chinese VIP database). We only selected original articles that either reported the prevalence of suicide attempts or sufficient data for calculating the prevalence. A total of 29 eligible studies, with 88,225 college students, were finally included. The maximum and minimum reported prevalences of suicide attempts among college students in China were 0.4% and 10.5%, respectively. The pooled prevalence of suicide attempts was 2.8% (95%CI: 2.3%-3.3%). Subgroup analyses showed that the pooled estimate of prevalence of life time suicide attempts was 2.7% (95%CI: 2.1%-3.3%), and 12-month suicide attempts was 2.9% (95%CI: 2.0%-3.8%). The prevalence for males was 2.4% (95%CI: 1.8%-3.0%), and for females was 2.7% (95%CI: 1.9%-3.7%). The prevalences among college students in grade 1 through 4 were 2.8% (95%CI: 1.7%-3.8%), 1.8% (95%CI: 1.2%-2.3%), 2.0% (95%CI: 0.8%-3.1%), and 2.9% (95%CI: 0.1%-6.7%), respectively. The prevalences among college students from rural and urban areas were 5.1% (95%CI: 2.8%-7.5%) and 3.7% (95%CI: 1.4%-5.9%), respectively. 2.8% prevalence of suicide attempts and more than 600,000 suicide attempters among college students indicate that suicide attempt among college students is an important public health problem in China. More attention should be paid to the current situation.