People with a parent who died by suicide are about three times as likely as someone in the general population to also die by suicide, a large registry study suggests.

The Danish study of 4.5 million patient records also found that, if parents made a suicide attempt, their children were more than 2.5 times more likely than others to make such an attempt.

The study showed that transgenerational concordance also extended to the choice of methods of suicide: if a parent died by a violent method, the child was more likely to do so.

“Our findings underscore the importance of enquiring about family history, including suicide and attempted suicide in family members, when assessing suicide risk in patients,” said the researchers from the University of Copenhagen and the University of Oxford.