# Approximating Mechanisms of Suicide Risk to Innovate Interventions for Mid-to-Late-Life Veterans

> **NIH VA IK1** · VETERANS AFFAIRS MED CTR SAN FRANCISCO · 2024 · —

## Abstract

The current 2-year career development award (CDA-1) proposal is designed to prepare Dr. Michael
Ruderman, a VA Psychiatrist with foundational knowledge of advanced research methods, for a career in VA
conducting research as a psychiatrist scientist who will advance innovation in suicide prevention and
intervention strategies—identifying and targeting causal mechanisms for suicide that are amenable for
intervention. Dr. Ruderman will accomplish this goal through the pursuit and completion of training activities,
support from an expert mentoring team, and completion of a research project aimed at bridging the gap
between causal inference research methods and clinical knowledge to inform suicide interventions. The CDA-1
project will ultimately generate pilot information about causal factors for suicide risk with refinement based on
expert elicitation for Dr. Ruderman’s submission of a CDA-2 application.
 Dr. Ruderman’s proposed CDA-1 project supports VA’s top clinical priority—Preventing suicide.
Moreover, this proposal is directly aligned with VA’s mandate to prioritize research that can help develop
targeted suicide interventions by finding out why certain Veterans are at risk of suicide. Despite VA’s strong
predictive analytics for stratifying Veterans at risk for suicide, the mechanisms leading to suicide are poorly
understood. This lack of knowledge has impeded the innovation of targeted and effective interventions
available. National suicide research agendas urge investigators to leverage existing data and determine
potential causal targets that could define or develop effective suicide interventions. However, few large-scale
databases exist that would have the capacity to harmonize and link to the right breadth and depth of
information to successfully detect causal targets for a rare (yet, profound) outcome like suicide. Thus, this
CDA-1 proposed research leverages Dr. Amy Byers’ (primary mentor on the CDA-1) CSR&D Merit award
project (CX001119), which uniquely formed a longitudinal cohort of 5 million Veterans aged 50 years and older
including, currently, nearly 12,000 suicide deaths and data on demographics, inpatient, outpatient,
medications, labs, and morbidity. The CDA-1 project will expand upon Dr. Byers’ research on late-life suicide
risk looking at prognostic factors and fill a significant gap in the field, causal inference, complementing
predictive analytics in suicide risk research at VA. Furthermore, focusing on mid-to-late-life Veterans is ideal
because it supplies targeted information in this understudied and highly vulnerable group, who have the
highest number of lives lost to suicide (~70% of all Veteran suicide deaths), as well as make up over 70% of
the Veteran population.
 Discovering candidates from large secondary data requires an approach that can extract causal
information efficiently while also prioritizing likelihood of clinical utility. Data-driven causal methods have the
potential to do this, but only if such methods...

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10811578
- **Project number:** 5IK1CX002501-02
- **Recipient organization:** VETERANS AFFAIRS MED CTR SAN FRANCISCO
- **Principal Investigator:** Michael Alan Ruderman
- **Activity code:** IK1 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** VA
- **Fiscal year:** 2024
- **Award amount:** —
- **Award type:** 5
- **Project period:** 2023-01-01 → 2024-12-31

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10811578

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10811578, Approximating Mechanisms of Suicide Risk to Innovate Interventions for Mid-to-Late-Life Veterans (5IK1CX002501-02). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-27 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10811578. Licensed CC0.

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