Your birth month may affect your disease risk

People try to pin a lot of things on when you’re born (such as personality, favourite colour, ideal careers), usually with no scientific backing whatsoever. But a new study has found compelling evidence to suggest that the month you’re born actually can affect your risk of developing 55 different diseases, including asthma and heart disease.

 

 

A team of data scientists from Columbia University Medical Center in the US looked at the medical records of more than 1.7 million people and found that the healthiest month to be born in the Northern Hemisphere is May, while the month associated with the most diseases is October, closely followed by November.

 

But before all you October babies start freaking out, don’t worry, none of this is cause to panic. “It’s important not to get overly nervous about these results because even though we found significant associations the overall disease risk is not that great,” said lead researchers and data scientist Nicholas Tatonetti in a press release.

 

“The risk related to birth month is relatively minor when compared to more influential variables like diet and exercise.” The point of the research wasn’t to scare people off giving birth in certain months, but rather to use the mass of data available to uncover new disease risk factors, says Tatonetti.

 

In particular, their study helped to confirm the findings from 39 previous studies on birth season and disease risk, and suggest that “seasonally-dependent early developmental mechanisms may play a role in increasing lifetime risk of disease,” as the authors write in the paper, published in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association.

 

It’s these seasonally-linked environmental mechanisms — potentially things such as pollen counts, dust mite exposure and temperature fluctuations — that the team now hope to identify using additional data.

 

 

Astrology puts a lot of stock on what month you were born in, and that really hurts this type of research, since there isn’t much scientific evidence to support that,” Tatonetti told Alice Park at Time. “But seasonality is a proxy for variable environmental factors present at the time of your birth, and we are learning more about the very large role that environment, and gene-environment interactions, plays in our development. This could be one way to start mapping out those effects.”

 

To asses the link between birth month and disease risk, Tatonetti and his team looked at data collected between 1985 and 2013 of 1.7 million patients all born in the last century. They then created an algorithm that would seek out any association between patients' birth months and 1,688 different medical conditions.

 

 

What they found was that, regardless of how old patients were or their sex, there were certain months that were more closely linked to the risk of particular diseases.

 

For instance, people born in September seemed to have a higher risk of asthma, while those born in November were slightly more likely to have ADHD. And people born in March have the highest risk of several heart conditions.