[Prevention of young people's suicide: strengthen resilience and focus on mental health problems]. / Suïcidepreventie bij jongeren.

It is highly tragic when a young person commits suicide. Van Vuuren et al. show trends among self-reported suicidal thoughts and suicidal attempts among over 25.000 Amsterdam children, aged 13 and 14, of different educational levels and ethnic backgrounds, between 2010 and 2015. They advise policy makers to base their choice of suicide prevention measures on the information about trends. In this commentary, we state that policy makers should refrain from doing so, because of the unclear relation between highly prevalent self-reported suicidal thoughts and attempts and extremely rare actual suicide, because of negligence of cultural aspects of suicide in handling the evidence and because trends based on data from 2010-2015 are useless when devising policies in the midst of the covid-19 crisis. We advise policy makers to focus on strengthening young people's resilience and on the prevention of mental health problems instead.

Prevalence of functional constipation among Palestinian preschool children and the relation to stressful life events.

AIM: Increasing evidence exists with respect to the relation between stressful life events and functional constipation (FC). We aimed to investigate the prevalence of FC in Palestinian refugee preschool children and to determine if stress and trauma exposure are risk factors of FC in these children. METHODS: From November 2013 until May 2014, a cross-sectional survey was conducted in West Bank, Gaza and Jordan. Mothers of 862 Palestinian refugee children aged 7-48 months were interviewed on defecation pattern, socio-economic factors and the child's exposure to traumatic events. RESULTS: Twelve percent of the Palestinian refugee children fulfilled the criteria for FC. The prevalence of constipation was significantly lower in Gaza compared to Jordan (2% vs. 17%, p <0,001). Living in Gaza was associated with lower odds of FC (OR 0,08, 95% CI 0,03-0,20). Trauma exposure was associated with higher odds of FC (OR 1,19, 95% CI 1,06-1,35), however only a small number of children had been exposed to traumatic events. CONCLUSION: The overall prevalence of FC in Palestinian preschool children is comparable to prevalence rates among older children worldwide. In this age group stressful life events and trauma exposure seem not to play an important role in the development of FC.