According to the findings of a current study, the suicide rate among American teens was lower in 2005. Except 2004, when researchers observed an 18% increase, the suicide rate among U.S. adolescents had been falling constantly over the previous 10 years.

The 2004 increase was regarded by specialists as an anomaly and was mainly caused by a governmental warning about antidepressant. The warning made numerous patients stop taking the pills and this led to more suicides that year.

In 2003, widespread ad campaigns linked antidepressants, such as Prozac and Zoloft, to suicidal thoughts in youngsters. In 2004, the Food and Drug Administration imposed the measure under which the drugs must carry a "black box" warning and this caused prescriptions to fall about 20%.

However, researchers warned that, despite the fact that the suicide rate has dropped steadily over the past decade, the trend is still upward. The researchers studied data on suicide cases among teens over a 15-year period. The conclusion was that suicide rates in youngsters aged between 10 and 19 were higher than expected in 2004 and 2005 compared to the suicide rates from 1996 to 2003.

"This is significant, because pediatric suicide rates in the U.S. had been declining steadily for a decade until 2004,” said Jeff Bridge, from Nationwide Children's Hospital in Columbus, Ohio. He added that there might be a possibility of “an emerging public health crisis.”

"It is certainly cause for concern," said Robert D. Gibbons of the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Specialists at Nationwide Children's Hospital in Columbus, Ohio, and Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh used information provided from the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control. The findings of their study were published in the Sept. 3 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.

The study also tried to establish the main causes of the higher number of teens committing suicide. The influence of Internet social networking sites and untreated depression were among those factors.

The U.S. troops who committed suicide after returning from Iraq and Afghanistan also influenced the high suicide rate over that period.