Suicide was found to be six times more common among adolescent boys than girls in Cork and Kerry in a new study, which also found high self-harm rates among girls.

A team from the National Suicide Foundation at UCC found that gender differences in of self-harm and suicide were very large, with boys who have harmed themselves at particularly high risk of suicide.

The researchers calculated annual suicide rates for 15-17 year-olds in the Cork and Kerry region based on data from the Central Statistics Office.

They also collected data on rates of hospital-treated self-harm from the Irish National Registry of Deliberate Self-Harm. Rates of self-harm in the community were looked at using a survey of 3,881 adolescents.

The researchers stressed that suicide is a leading cause of death among adolescents.

They found that the annual suicide rate was 10/100,000 among 15-17 year-olds was 10 per 100,000 and suicide was six times more common among boys than girls.

The annual incidence rate of hospital-treated self-harm among the adolescents studied was 344/100,000, with the female rate almost twice the male rate, the researchers found.

Girls were almost four times more likely to report self-harm, according to the study.

"For every boy who died by suicide, 16 presented to hospital with self-harm and 146 reported self-harm in the community. For every female suicide, 162 girls presented to hospital with self-harm and 3,296 reported self-harm," the researchers said.

Knowledge of the relative incidence of self-harm and suicide in adolescents can be of valuable use to prevention programmes and services, they said.

The research is puboished in the journal Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology.