The suicide rate among U.S. girls aged between 15 and 19 in 2015 hit a 40-year peak since 1975, research conducted by the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) showed on Thursday.
The research, which analyzes a period of between 1975 and 2015, revealed that the suicide rate for those girls reached 5.1 per 100,000 in the final year, a more than doubled figure of what it was in 2007, after a previous peak at 3.7 per 100,000 in 1990.
That figure of boys in the same age group, by comparison, was lower than in the peak years of the mid-1980s through the mid-1990s, it said.
To be specific, the suicide rate for boys aged between 15 and 19 grew to a peak at 18.1 per 100,000 in 1990 from 12 per 100,000 in 1975, while it dropped to 10.8 per 100,000 in 2007 before bouncing to 14.2 per 100,000 by 2015.
Based on the newly-released results, analysts said though teenage girls are more likely to have suicidal a thought, boys take their own lives at nearly four times the rate of girls. Pills are most frequently used when females commit suicide, while boys prefer to use firearms.
Housed within the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the NCHS is an agency of the U.S. Federal Statistical System which provides statistical information for policy-makers to work on health of the U.S. citizens.
