Some researchers believe that the month in which we are born is related to trends that mark our health and the way we relate to our 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 they cover.

The month of birth indicates the risk of 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 suffering from a list of diseases. Their conclusions seem to correspond with what they wanted to demonstrate and have recently been published in Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association .

Statistics stuff

This team of researchers used as raw material the information already existing in databases and searched for correlations between the time of birth and the propensity to each disease by applying an algorithm.

The analysis of statistical data showed that, of the 1,688 diseases in the sample (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 risk of disease, 19 had already been found in previous studies and 20 are related to these 19.

Months and illnesses

The correlations of disease risk found are, for each month of birth, as follows:

1. January : cardiomyopathy and hypertension.

2. February : lung or bronchial cancer.

3. March : arrhythmias, heart failure and mitral valve disorder.

4. April : anginas.

5. May : no increased risk of disease was found due to being born in this month.

6. June : pre-infarction syndrome.

7. July : asthma.

8. August : like the group of those born in May, no special risk of suffering from any disease was found.

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.

Don’t let the alarms go off!

This data should be taken critically. As has been said a thousand times, correlation does not mean causality , and there is nothing to indicate that 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 for predicting how often certain diseases occur in the group of those 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 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. P. (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