14 DAY TRIAL // The final grades of Swedish kids leaving primary school (year nine at 16 years old) are an indicator of their suicide risks at an early age, suggests a new study carried out by the medical university Karolinska Institute and the Swedish National Board of Health and Welfare.
In Sweden, primary school ends at age 16 and teenagers with the lowest average grades have nearly three times more risks of committing suicide, compared to those who graduate with high grades.
For the study, the researchers recorded the leaving grades of nearly 900,000 former graduates who were born between 1972 and 1981, at a time when Swedish schools had a five-point numerical grade scale.
These individuals were followed up to the ages of 25 to 34, and the results showed that those who had the highest grades, presented the lowest suicide risk.
Also, people who ended school with grades above average but below top level had a higher risk of committing suicide compared to those with top grades, and those who graduated with average grades had a slightly higher risk than others.
The highest suicide risk was noted in young people with incomplete grades: those leavings school with grades under 2.25 had a suicide risk three times higher than those who had leaving grades over 4.25.
And even though boys presented a higher suicide risk, the pattern was mainly the same for boys and girls.
Charlotte Björkenstam, doctoral student at Karolinska Institutet and managing director of the Swedish National Board of Health and Welfare’s cause-of-death register says that “the correlation is clear, despite having excluded young people who had been in hospital for mental health problems or drug-related diagnoses.”
The researchers also accounted for several other factors like the educational level of the parents, whether the parents were on benefit or single, the age of the mothers, the mental health of the parents and possible drug use, and whether the child had been adopted or not.
The only thing that came out was that children of low-educated parents received lower grades.
Ms Björkenstam said that what the “study reveals most of all is how important it is to identify and assist pupils who are unable to meet the performance requirements.”
The research was published in The Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health.