Suicide is top cause of early death in physicians. (Far Higher than in General Population).

HENDERSON, NEV. -- Suicide ranks as the leading cause of premature death among physicians, Dr. Peter Mansky said at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Addiction Psychiatry.

"Physicians probably start out with better health than the regular population, but we take less care of ourselves as our careers go on," said Dr. Mansky, medical director of the Committee for Physicians' Health, a division of the Medical Society of the State of New York in Albany. "We're working long hours, and we put great stress on ourselves. Long hours isolate us from our support system."

According to various studies in the medical literature from 1963 to 1991, the relative risk for suicide among male physicians increased from 1.1 to 3.4, while the risk among female physicians jumped from 2.5 to 5.7.

At the same time, deaths among physicians from cancer, heart disease, and other ailments dropped 40%-60%.

However, in an interview, Dr. Mansky was quick to point out that many studies of suicide among physicians are "20 years old and fraught with methodological defects."

In his informal study Dr. Mansky asked the medical directors of six state physician health programs to tabulate the number of physician suicides between 1992 and 2002. Out of 2,500 participants enrolled in the six programs during that time--mostly for drug and alcohol dependence--13 committed suicide, a number that translates into a relatively low rate.

That finding runs counter to the results from one of the most recent studies aimed at tracking the cause of death among physicians in 28 states between 1984 and 1995 as reported by the National Occupational Mortality Surveillance database.