[Relationship between the number of hours of sunshine and the number of (violent) suicides in Hungary].

Aim - Studying the impact of the sunshine on the numbers of suicides. The number of suicides is highest in the late spring and early summer months, while it is lowest in the cold, gloomy winter. Although the exact causes are still unknown, there are some theories about this phenomenon. A number of studies conducted in recent years have concluded that the rise in suicide rate during the warm months might be due to an increased exposure to sunlight, especially in the cases of the violent method. We studied the validity of this hypothesis on a large Hungarian database.We analyzed the number of monthly hours of sunshine and the number of suicides by sex and by violent vs. non-violent method over a 360-month period. Our sample consisted of 127 877 committed suicides between 1971 and 2000. The parabolic trend of seasonality had to be removed from the suicide time series, then regression analysis was conducted on the seasonally adjusted data.Our analysis revealed that in Hungary there was no statistically significant direct relationship between the number of hours of sunshine and the number of suicides. Moreover, there was no correlation between the hours of sunshine and the number of violent suicides either.If the above claim were confirmed in subsequent research, it would mean that our current therapeutic regime should be reconsidered during the spring-summer seasons.