assessment of executive functions of poisoning following suicide

Background: in the present study, we investigated the executive functions (efs) following suicide with acute poisoning.methods: in this cross-sectional study from april to august 2020 in khorshid hospital affiliated with isfahan university of medical sciences, isfahan, iran, adult poisoned patients (n = 120) suffering from suicide were selected by convenience sampling method and divided into three groups: recurrent suicide attempts, and suicide attempts for the first time with and without previous psychiatric disorders. continuous performance tests (cpts) including commission error components, omission response, correct response, and response time were used to evaluate efs. chi-square and fisher's exact test were used to analyze qualitative variables. moreover, multi-dimensional regression analysis was used to find the predictors of recurrent suicide in spss software.results: a significant difference among the patients of the three groups regarding their all-subgroup cpt scores was observed (p < 0.05). the omission response and response time components were higher in patients with a history of psychiatric disorder than in the other two groups. however, in the commission error component, the mean scores were higher in the patients with recurrent suicide. there was also a significant difference in the omission response (p = 0.008), the response time (p = 0.04), and the correct answer (p = 0.016) concerning patients’ education. in multivariate regression analysis, the education level predicted recurrent suicide attempts. patients with education less than high school [odds ratio (or): 13.23, 95% confidence interval (ci): 1.5-115.7, p = 0.02] and diploma (or: 11.35, 95% ci: 1.30-96.88, p = 0.026) had more chance of recurrent suicide.conclusion: this study provides important information regarding the interventions with an education that can help prevent suicide.