Nightmares are intensive dreams with negative emotional
tone. Frequent nightmares can pose a

serious clinical problem and in 2001, Tanskanen et al. found
that nightmares increase the risk of suicide.

However, the dataset used by these authors included war
veterans in whom nightmare frequency - and

possibly also suicide risk - is elevated. Therefore,
re-examination of the association between nightmares

and suicide in these data is warranted. We investigated the
relationship between nightmares and

suicide both in the general population and war veterans in
Finnish National FINRISK Study from the

years 1972 to 2012, a dataset overlapping with the one used
in the study by Tanskanen et al. Our data

comprise 71,068 participants of whom 3139 are war veterans.
Participants were followed from their

survey participation until the end of 2014 or death.
Suicides (N = 398) were identified from the National

Causes of Death Register. Frequent nightmares increase the
risk of suicide: The result of Tanskanen et al.

holds even when war experiences are controlled for. Actually
nightmares are not significantly associated

with suicides among war veterans. These results support the
role of nightmares as an independent risk

factor for suicide instead of just being proxy for history
of traumatic experiences.