Although the high rate of suicide in elderly people is conventionally
explained as being due to greater intent to die, we have noted elderly Sri
Lankans dying after relatively mild poisoning. Using data from cases of
yellow oleander poisoning, we investigated the effect of age on outcome in
1697 patients, controlling for gender and amount ingested. In fully adjusted
models, people over 64 years old were 13.8 (95% CI 3.6–53.0) times more
likely to die than those less than 25 years old. The high number of suicides
in elderly people globally is likely to be due, in part, to the difficulty
they face in surviving the effects of both the poisoning and its
treatment.