Your Birth Month May Affect Your Health
Your Birth Month May Affect Your Health – The month you were born may now help doctors identify what diseases you might be at risk for.
Columbia University researchers, led by Nicholas Tatonetti, PhD, an assistant professor of biomedical informatics at Columbia University Medical Center (CUMC) and Columbia’s Data Science Institute, came up with a computational method to examine the relationship between birth month and disease. They used an algorithm to look at medical databases of New York City and found a connection between 55 diseases and the season of birth.
A few earlier studies on ADHD and asthma showed a link between season of birth and the diseases, and this motivated Tatonetti to explore this link further. They compared 1,688 diseases against the birth dates and medical histories of 1.7 million patients treated at New York-Presbyterian Hospital/CUMC between 1985 and 2013.
The study confirmed 39 previously established links, and discovered 16 new connections. Overall, researchers found that the months of January, February, March and April were associated with cardiovascular diseases or risk factors, such as hypertension, atrial fibrillation, atherosclerosis, and angina. September was associated with asthma, October with ADHD, and November with viral infection. People born in May had the lowest risk of disease, while those born in October had the highest.
Dr. Tatonetti points out that though the association between birth month and disease was significant, the overall disease risk associated with birth month is not much when compared to diet and other lifestyle factors, and people should not be overly concerned.
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