NEW YORK, March 28 (UPI) -- Doctors are questioning whether some teenage suicides in the United States over the past decade were really the accidental outcome of the "choking game."
"Asphyxiation games have been with us for generations but what makes the current generation's execution of this game different is that more kids are willing to play it alone," Dr. Thomas Andrew, the chief medical examiner in New Hampshire, told The New York Times.
Andrew has consulted on 20 deaths around the country in which the game was suspected. He grew convinced that the choking game, in which the participant cuts off the oxygen supply to their brain to achieve a "high," usually by tying something around their neck, was responsible in at least four of the cases. As far as he knows the death certificates were not changed, the newspaper said.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that in 2004, 779 children between the ages of 10 and 19 committed suicide by suffocation. In the early 1980s, the figure was 450.
