The month of birth indicates the risk of suffering from some diseases
Some researchers believe that the month in which we are born is related to trends that mark our health and our way of relating to the environment . This type of theories emphasize the importance of the stimuli that are received during the months of gestation and the first days after birth, and this sequence of stimuli could be different depending on the period of the year they cover.
The month of birth indicates the risk of suffering from some diseases
In line with this type of hypothesis, a group of researchers from Columbia University set out to investigate whether there is a correlation between the month of birth and the risk of having a list of diseases. Their conclusions seem to correspond to what they wanted to demonstrate and have been recently published in Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association.
Statistics things
This team of researchers used the existing information in databases as a raw material and searched Correlations between the moment of birth and the propensity to each disease by applying an algorithm.
The analysis of statistical data served to verify that, of the 1,688 diseases presented by the sample (1,749,400 people born between 1985 and 2013 registered in databases in New York), 55 were related to the month of birth of the group of individuals . In addition, of those 55 correlations between time of birth and risk of illness, 19 have already been found in previous studies and 20 are related to those 19.
Months and diseases
The correlations of risk of illness found are, for each month of birth, the following:
1. January : cardiomyopathy and hypertension.
2. February : lung or bronchial cancer.
3. March : arrhythmias, heart failure and mitral valve disorder.
4. April : angina
5. May : there was no greater risk of suffering from any disease due to the fact of being born in this month.
6. June : Pre-infarction syndrome.
7. July asthma
8. August : As the group of those born in May, there was no special risk of suffering from any disease.
9. September : vomiting
10. October : sexually transmitted diseases, chest infections and insect bites.
11. November : arrhythmia, mitral valve disorder and lung cancer.
12. December : only bruises.
Do not let the alarms go off!
It is convenient to assume these data with a critical sense. As has already been said a thousand times, Correlation does not mean causality , and there is nothing to indicate that the fact of being born in one month or another means that we all have some of these diseases in a latent state, waiting to manifest themselves.
This study simply uses the month of birth as a criterion to predict the frequency with which certain diseases occur in the group born at each time of the year. However, it is not a case study: it focuses on a collective phenomenon that can only be interpreted as a tendency that can only appear in very large groups of people.
Bibliographic references:
- Boland, M.R., Shahnn, Z., Madigan, D., Hripsack, G. and Tatonetti, N. P. (2015). Birth Month Affects Lifetime Disease Risk: A Phenome-Wide Method. Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, online consultation. doi: //dx.doi.org/10.1093/jamia/ocv046
