NIH awards $19.5 million to Ohio State

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NIH awards $19.5 million to Ohio State

New research study aims to improve suicide risk prediction nationwide

Research shows that nearly half of individuals who die by suicide had visited a health care provider in the weeks prior to their death. Yet, existing suicide screening approaches in health care settings fail to identify most patients who go on to engage in suicidal behavior or die by suicide.

In an effort to enhance suicide risk prediction nationwide, researchers at The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center and College of Medicine are launching a study funded by a $19.5 million award from the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

The study will begin recruiting about 13,500 participants nationwide in January, including about 4,000 people from Ohio, Michigan and Indiana who have recently visited a health care provider. Individuals between the ages 18 and 55 will be recruited, representing varying levels of risk for suicide.

Approximately 4,200 higher-risk participants will be recruited based on recent health care visits, including those from clinics for depression, PTSD, psychosis or risk for psychosis, sleep disorders, pain and underinsured individuals, to represent a range of moderate to high suicide risk groups.

Researchers will follow participants for about six weeks to try to better understand which individuals will or will not go on to have suicide risk after seeing a doctor.

"We aim to understand how people experience suicide risk and manage challenges. By applying dynamical systems modeling and AI, we hope to analyze this data and predict when individuals may be most at risk for a suicide attempt," said study principal investigator Jessica Turner, PhD, a cognitive neuroscientist in the department of psychiatry and behavioral health at Ohio State. "This study will help us gain a better understanding of who goes on to make a suicide attempt, and when."

The study, called ARTEMIS (Analyses to Reveal Trajectories and Early Markers of Imminent Shifts in Suicidal States), will also measure other important factors that might impact how people experience suicide risk. This includes using cognitive tasks to understand how people think and approach problems, measuring people's activity through their smartphone sensors, and asking key questions about sleep patterns and mental health symptoms.

The ARTEMIS team incorporates broad expertise in the multi-principal investigator team that includes these Ohio State experts:

• Melanie Bozzay, PhD, suicide and digital phenotyping
• Jay Fournier, PhD, depression and predictive modeling
• Scott Langenecker, PhD, virtual cognitive assessment and bipolar disorder
• Ivy Tso, PhD, psychosis and neurocognitive assessment

This team also comprises a network of participating institutions, including the University of Utah for computational modeling; the University of Michigan for bipolar disorder; and Indiana University for psychosis.

"ARTEMIS will revolutionize the strategies we have available for clinicians to detect urgent suicidal crises," said Bozzay. "These efforts are vital to help providers in our health care systems prevent suicides by targeting lifesaving interventions to the right person, at the right time."

The ARTEMIS study benefits from the Ohio State team's experience in large-scale recruitment, longitudinal assessment, behavioral phenotyping, identifying and treating clinical markers of suicide risk, and advanced modeling techniques for risk prediction, said K. Luan Phan, MD, chair of psychiatry and behavioral health at Ohio State.

"It also reflects our ongoing research efforts in suicide, trauma, psychosis, substance use and mood disorders, making use of connections and participants from the State of Ohio Adversity and Resilience (SOAR) study," he said.

The (SOAR Study) statewide research initiative led by Ohio State Wexner Medical Center seeks to identify the root causes of the ongoing epidemic of persistent emotional distress, suicide and drug overdose. It received an initial $20 million grant from The Ohio Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services. Moving forward, the continuation of the SOAR Study will be funded through a combination of sources including philanthropy, external grants similar to ARTEMIS and Wexner Medical Center funding.

"ARTEMIS builds on the strong foundation of the SOAR Study - both studies advance our understanding and treatment of mental health issues through the measurement of longitudinal patient risks and outcomes," said Andrew Thomas, MD, chief clinical officer at Ohio State Wexner Medical Center. "We appreciate that the NIH values the research we do at Ohio State and anticipate we will have a number of additional grants in the future that leverage our SOAR infrastructure and expertise as we advance solutions to help save lives."

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