The month of birth indicates the risk of suffering 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. These types of theories emphasize the importance of the stimuli 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 that encompass.

The month of birth indicates the risk of suffering some diseases

In line with this type of hypothesis, a group of researchers from Columbia University proposed investigate whether there is a correlation between the month of birth and the risk of suffering from a list of diseases. Their conclusions seem to correspond to what they wanted to demonstrate and have recently been published in Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association.

Statistical things

This team of researchers used the information already existing in databases as raw material and searched for correlations between the time 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 that the sample presented (1,749,400 people born between 1985 and 2013 registered in New York databases), 55 were related to the month of birth of the group of individuals. Furthermore, of these 55 correlations between time of birth and disease risk, 19 had already been found in previous studies and 20 are related to those 19.

months and diseases

The disease risk correlations 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: no increased risk of suffering from any disease was found due to the fact of being born in this month.

6. June: pre-infarct syndrome.

7. July: asthma.

8. August: Like 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.

Let the alarms not go off!

It is convenient to take these data with a critical sense. As has already been said a thousand times, correlation does not mean causation, and there is nothing to indicate that the fact of being born in one month or another implies 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 of those born at each time of the year. However, it is not a study of specific cases: it focuses on a collective phenomenon that can only be interpreted as a trend that can only appear in very large groups of people.

Bibliographic references:

• Boland, M. R., Shahnn, Z., Madigan, D., Hripsack, G. and Tatonetti, N. Q. (2015). Birth Month Affects Lifetime Disease Risk: A Phenome-Wide Method. Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, online consultation. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/jamia/ocv046