New Data on Suicide Mortality from the CDC. Using data from the National Vital Statistics System (NVSS), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recently released a report on rates of suicide in the United States from 1999 to 2017. The data brief ranks suicide as the second leading cause of death for people aged 10-34 and the fourth leading cause for ages 35-54. For the most recent year studied, the age-adjusted suicide rate for the most rural counties was nearly twice (1.8 times) the rate for the most urban counties. In a separate data brief from the CDC, the NVSS showed there were 70,237 drug overdose deaths in 2017. The surveillance system found that, among persons aged 15 and over, adults aged 25-54 had higher rates than other age groups. West Virginia, Ohio and Pennsylvania were the three states with the highest observed age-adjusted overdose death rates in 2017; the four states with the lowest rates were Texas, North Dakota, South Dakota and Nebraska.
