Birth Month May Dictate
People looking to their birth astrological sign to know the future might just as well consult hospital records.
Birth months are associated with certain high and low risks of specific ailments, according to a large data-driven study published in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association.
“Lifetime disease risk is affected by birth month,” concluded the Columbia University authors. “Seasonally dependent early developmental mechanisms may play a role in increasing lifetime risk of disease.”
Some 1,749,400 individuals who were born at New York-Presbyterian/Columbia University Medical
Center between 1900 and 2000 were analyzed using a computer database, tracking the diseases those people were eventually afflicted with over the course of their lifetimes.
They found 55 diseases that were significantly depended on birth month. Nineteen were already known to the scientific literature, like certain subsets of asthma for babies born in months with elevated levels of dust. Those were confirmed by the researchers.
But there were a myriad of other ailments first identified to be statistically weighted toward certain birth dates. ADHD diagnoses were much less likely in March, for instance – but became increasing more likely in the summer months, with a peak in November, according to the study.
Many heart illnesses are much more likely for babies born in the first few months of the year – and much less likely for children born at the end of the calendar year, they found. Those afflictions include atrial fibrillation, hypertension, congestive cardiac failure, angina, cardiac complications of care, cardiomyopathy, chronic myocardial ischemia and mitral valve disorder, they found.
Other ailments that seemed to be weighed by birth month include asthma, which is more likely for babies born in late summer and early fall; and decreased lifetime reproductive performance for females born in the summer months.
The results were not the first link of birth month and lifetime health. In 1983, the first link of a subset of asthma to birth month was made by European researchers. A connection between younger students in class and higher incidences of ADHD drugs being administered was made by a University of Iceland scientist in 2012.
But this study covered more people, and more ailments than ever before – mostly because of the proliferation of Electronic Health Records (EHRs), which made the data-crunching easier, the researchers said.
No comments:
Post a Comment