Birth Month And Disease

Analyzing a Popular Magazine and a Scholarly Journal for the Study of Birth Month and Lifetime Disease Risk When we ask people for their birthdays, some reasons may be because we are wondering how old they are, when we should buy them gifts, or we have a plain curiosity about what their zodiac signs are. Most of us do not intend on figuring out how their birth months might predict the kinds of diseases that they could develop over their lifetimes.
However, in an online article on Discover Magazine, written by journalist Carl Engelking, called, “Your Birth Month Influences Your Risk for Diseases,” Engelking states that “Your Zodiac symbol and birthstone aren’t the only things decided by your birth date: The day you entered this world may also
This seems like a reasonable approach for defining the variables and measuring the associations in this study because “birth month is used as a proxy for seasonal variations in physiological state or changes in environmental exposures.” In other words, the time of year that someone is born dictates many of the environmental factors that he or she is exposed to after birth and during early development. The relationship between birth month and disease risk depends on disease categories. For example, individuals born in October are at an increased risk for respiratory conditions but are at the same time at a decreased risk for cardiovascular conditions. To Engelking, “The link between asthma and fall babies,” or what he defines as babies born from the months of September to November, “may have to do with babies’ heightened exposure to indoor dust mites as people retreat indoors for the upcoming winter.” On the other hand, the researchers consider “autumn” to be from the months of October and December. The way that Engelking defines which months make up a particular season differs from the original study, but his explanations of the kinds of disease risks that are associated with the seasons are quite
The study has not been able to look more closely into interactions or explore the lifetime medical, genetic, lifestyle or environmental influences on any of the individuals. The researchers admit that the effects observed are likely the result of the climate effects of the New York City region, which would be “most comparable to Northern European climates.” Future investigation is needed to see if the same connections are observed in studies conducted in different regions, and then researchers can explore possible reasons behind these