Archie Bleyer, M.D., remembers the day his research focus shifted.
His 12-year-old grandson's classmate and soccer teammate died by a firearm. He knew the boy's mother and said that her son "left a note and used the gun, but didn't need to die because he had a bad day." In another instance, his patient awoke when hearing his son kill himself with a gun.
These events changed Bleyer's life. Bleyer is a clinical research professor at the OHSU Knight Cancer Institute. He has been a pediatric oncologist since 1971, focused on prevention and treatment of cancer in the adolescent young adult population, ages 15 to 39.
He continues to do cancer research , but in the past decade, his attention has turned toward a disturbing trend: More young people are now dying from bullets than from cancer. And the number is going up. Bleyer is lead author of a recent study in the journal PLOS ONE examining mental health disorder and firearm data from 2000 to 2019.
Using data from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation Global Health Burden, the researchers compared the United States to 40 countries with similar sociodemographic profiles. They found that while the prevalence of mental health disorders in the U.S.
is similar in all major categories to its 40 comparable sociodemographic countries, death by firearms is 20 times greater. "We have the same degree of mental health issues as other countries, but our firearm death rate is far greater and continuing to increase," Bleyer said. "In mos.