By using more refined measures of both smoking and SROs than previous studies, we were able to expand our understanding of these associations by discovering that early-onset nicotine dependence is the aspect of smoking most strongly predictive of subsequent SROs and that suicide ideation and, among ideators, suicide plans, are the only SROs predicted. Importantly, neither suicide gestures among ideators nor suicide attempts among ideators were significantly predicted by any of the smoking-related variables we considered. Significant unconditional time-lagged associations of smoking-related variables with subsequent suicide gestures and suicide attempts are, in fact, present in our data due to the people who make suicide gestures and attempts being a subset of the people who have suicide ideation, but our decomposition of the SROs shows that the significant associations are actually only with ideation and plans. Previous research has shown that other predictors of ideation differ from the conditional predictors of attempts among ideators.46 The predictive effects of smoking now have to be conceptualized in terms of this emerging evidence of differential effects.
