“An ongoing Defense Department-directed epidemiological study recently got a helping hand that could help generate actionable recommendations to reduce military suicides.”
“A new memorandum of agreement on the Study to Assess Risk & Resilience in Servicemembers, or STARRS, was inked July 27 to help produce actionable information for senior military leaders, said Col. Sheila Seitz, the STARRS deputy director and Army Reserve advisor…”
“The VA is the newest member of the group that includes the Army, Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Health Affairs, and the National Institute of Mental Health, or NIMH. The Army serves as the operational and management support arm of STARRS, the largest mental health study ever conducted on military personnel…”
“Funded by the DOD, the research partnership helps pinpoint risk factors linked to troops’ emotional and mental health, while also creating actionable steps toward suicide prevention, Cox said, along with other mental and behavioral health issues still faced in the military.”
“‘Funding has been committed to perform the long-term follow-up of the health of the study population through 2024,’ Seitz said…”
“When complete, the expanded study will contain over 3 billion de-identified, administrative data records of Soldiers extracted from 46 Army and DOD databases. The expanded study will support analyses that are more complex and improve the performance of predictive models using advanced statistical methods such as machine learning…” Read the full article here.
Source: VA joins Army in major DOD research effort to prevent suicides – By Thomas Brading, September 11, 2020. Army News Service.
