The more often a family moves, the higher the likelihood that a child relocating to a new home will attempt or commit suicide, a new study of Danish children suggests.

Combing through a Danish national database of children who have attempted or committed suicide, researchers at Aarhus University in Denmark found that a majority -- 55 percent -- of these children had changed residences more than three times in their childhoods.

Among the comparison group of children who never had attempted or committed suicide, fewer than 1 in 3 had made more than three household moves.

Each year, 1 in 5 U.S. families moves, making Americans among the most transient people in the industrialized world. In 2004, the last year for which child suicides were counted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 4,599 youths ages 10 to 24 committed suicide.

The study underscores "the importance of stability on a child's psychosocial well-being," according to the authors, led by Dr. Ping Qin.

Children who move frequently suffer a break in their relationships with friends and classmates, disruptions in their participation in organized activities, distress and worries, the authors wrote in the latest issue of the Archives of General Psychiatry.

A small group of the children who acted to end their lives -- 7.4 percent -- had moved more than 10 times by the time they were in the 11-17 age bracket studied. The authors stressed that they could not tell whether frequent moves were the immediate cause of the suicidal gestures.

It could be, for instance, that parents with mental-health issues are more likely to move frequently, and that their children are more vulnerable to mental illness themselves because of genetic inheritance and upbringing. But even after the researchers in Denmark took account of parents' mental health in their calculations, children who moved more often were found more likely to try to kill themselves.