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The rate at which young Americans took their own lives reached a high-water mark in 2017, driven by a sharp rise in suicides among older teenage boys, according to new research. In that year alone, suicide claimed the lives of 5,016 males and 1,225 females between 15 and 24 in the United States, researchers reported Tuesday in the Journal of the American Medical Assn. (Healy, 6/18)

The study by Harvard Medical School researchers shows that from 2000 to 2017, the suicide rate rose by 47 percent among teens age 15 to 19 and 36 percent among those 20 to 24. That’s well above the 30 percent increase seen across all age groups. Although the trend of soaring youth suicides is well known, the report provides the first breakdown of this group by age and sex over several years. And it reveals a recent, abrupt spike. (Freyer, 6/18)

In 2017, there were 47 percent more suicides among people aged 15 to 19 than in the year 2000. Overall, there are 36 percent more people aged 20 to 24 living in the U.S. today than at the turn of the century. With more than 6,200 suicides among people aged 15 to 24, suicide ranked as the second-leading cause of death for people in that age group in 2017, trailing behind deaths from unintentional motor vehicle accidents, which claimed 6,697 lives. (Frazee and Morales, 6/18)

"Previous studies talked more of an increase in female suicide, but what we’re showing is that rates among males are also increasing rapidly," Oren Miron, the study's lead author and a research associate in biomedical informatics at Harvard Medical School, told NBC News. (Edwards, 6/18)

The research also did not examine factors behind the increase in suicide rates. "Future studies should examine possible contributing factors and attempt to develop prevention measures by understanding the causes for the decrease in suicides found in the late 1990s," the researchers wrote. (Howard, 6/18)