Over the past decade, research and medical institutions have developed numerous apps that have helped patients living with serious health issues. From something as simple as logging sugar intake and mental health support to assisting with rehabilitation exercises and post-operative pain management, apps have emerged as a convenient solution for delivering medical help in recent years, especially in the pandemic era.
The latest success story comes courtesy of the Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center and College of Medicine and the Yale School of Medicine. An app developed by the experts at the institutions, called OTX-2022, helped bring down the recurrence of suicide attempts by a healthy margin among folks who have recently left a medical facility following an attempt at ending their life.
The app provides a dozen educational sessions lasting 10-15 minutes each to at-risk individuals with a mean age of roughly 28 years. After weeks of testing the app among patients who have attempted ending their lives before, the researchers concluded that the “adjusted rate of follow-up suicide attempts was 58.3% lower in the digital therapeutic group.
“This reduction is a critical achievement for a group that is particularly vulnerable to repeated suicidal behaviors,” the team behind the research said in a press statement. The findings of the remarkable suicide-focused cognitive behavior therapy (CBT) study have been published in the JAMA Network Open journal.
Suicide rates in the US have been on the rise for over two decades, and it is among the leading causes of death for individuals as young as 10 years. Notably, over a million people get involved in nonfatal suicidal behavior each year, and nearly half of them end up getting hospitalized.
How was the app tested?
The overarching benefit of using the app was that it “led to a sustained reduction in suicidal ideation.” The research tested the mobile app in a randomized clinical trial involving 339 participants in psychiatric hospitals who were admitted with elevated suicide risks in the US between 2022 and 2024.
“Although suicide-specific therapy is highly effective for reducing suicidal thoughts and urges, finding therapists who know how to do this life-saving therapy after leaving the hospital can be challenging. OTX-202 provides a possible solution to that problem,” Craig Bryan, first author of the study and a professor at Ohio State’s Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Health, said about the app.
According to experts, the period after being discharged from a hospital following a suicide attempt is the most risky, requiring vigilant intervention and care. The OTX-2022 app aims to fill that gap by offering proper guidance and necessary help to at-risk people.
After using the app, the participants were examined using the widely used CGI scale for assessing symptoms and improvements. The team discovered that the group of people who used the mobile app were “significantly more likely to show clinical improvement.” And it seems the app has proved its efficacy in the test phase itself.
“One suicide death occurred during the study in the control condition. There were no suicide deaths in the digital therapeutic group,” says the research paper.
