Building a neurocognitive profile of suicidal risk in severe mental disorders

Background: Research on the influence of neurocognitive factors on suicide risk, regardless of the diagnosis, is inconsistent. Recently, suicide risk studies propose applying a trans-diagnostic framework in line with the launch of the Research Domain Criteria Cognitive Systems model. In the present study, we highlight the extent of cognitive impairment using a standardized battery in a psychiatric sample stratified for different degrees of suicidal risk. We also differentiate in our sample various neurocognitive profiles associated with different levels of risk.

Materials and methods: We divided a sample of 106 subjects into three groups stratified by suicide risk level: Suicide Attempt (SA), Suicidal Ideation (SI), Patient Controls (PC) and Healthy Controls (HC). We conducted a multivariate Analysis of Variance (MANOVA) for each cognitive domain measured through the standardized battery MATRICS Consensus Cognitive Battery (MCCB).

Results: We found that the group of patients performed worse than the group of healthy controls on most domains; social cognition was impaired in the suicide risk groups compared both to HC and PC. Patients in the SA group performed worse than those in the SI group.

Conclusion: Social cognition impairment may play a crucial role in suicidality among individuals diagnosed with serious mental illness as it is involved in both SI and SA; noteworthy, it is more compromised in the SA group fitting as a marker of risk severity.