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Although various studies have investigated and found a significant link between age at first alcohol use and health risk behaviors, few studies have investigated the effect of age at first alcohol use on suicidal ideation among adolescents. The objective of this study was to investigate the effect of age at first alcohol use on suicidal ideation.

Data for this study were obtained from the 2015 Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance system. A sample of 10,745 adolescents aged 14–18 years (50.9% males) were analyzed using logistic regression with suicidal ideation as the outcome variable and age at first alcohol use as the main explanatory variable.

About 17% of adolescents experienced suicidal ideation during the past 12 months and 15.6% started having alcohol before age 13. Adolescents who started having alcohol before age 13 had 1.60 times higher odds of experiencing suicidal ideation …