Original article (in Serbian) was published on 14/11/2022
Children born these days will have an increased risk of respiratory infections, and the same applies to all those who celebrate their birthdays in November – we could draw such a conclusion from the text published by Alo. For more than a year, domestic media have been writing about a study which examines the influence of the month of birth on the risk of contracting certain diseases during life. One of the authors confirms for Tragac that some data from the research is not adequately conveyed and assesses that the interpretation of the study in media texts from Serbia is oversimplified.
“Birth month reveals what you will get sick from”
The study titled “Month of birth affects the risk of disease during life” was published in 2015 in the “Journal of the American Association for Medical Informatics”. The researchers state that they detected 55 diseases that depended more significantly on the month of birth: they determined that early developmental mechanisms that are seasonally dependent can play a role in increasing the risk of disease during life.
Web portal Alo published its recent text with the sensationalist title “PAY ATTENTION TO THE SYMPTOMS The month of birth reveals what you will get sick from”. One of the authors, Nikolas Tatoneti from New York’s Columbia University, told FakeNews Tragac that this is an example of simplifying the conclusions of the study, which does not strictly prove in any of its parts that the month of birth reveals what people who are born at that time will suffer from.
That the month of birth itself cannot be taken as a parameter is also explained in the segment of the paper dealing with a similar study in Denmark, which revealed that the two biggest peaks in the month of birth of asthmatics are in May and August, that is, June and July, while the study from the USA recorded similar peaks during July and October, that is, August and September. The authors explain that the difference most likely exists due to different climatic characteristics of the months of the year in Denmark and New York.
Intervals, not months
The disputed texts contain a list of all months of the year to which diseases or sets of diseases are assigned that are most common for people born that month. Although the list was allegedly separated from the study, there is no such type of division in the study nor the given data. One of the tables from the research shows the potential connections between the month of birth and the risk of disease, but through the periods of the year, so that it indicates the “peaks” of risk and the least risky periods.
Although the media assigned a disease to each month, in the table, May, July, August and November are not indicated as birth months in which any disease is more prevalent. Nikolas Tatoneti confirms that it is correct to look at the intervals shown by the graphs instead of separating the months.
In addition to the web portal Alo, this year, the identical list was published by Krstarica, Svet plus, Republika and 24sedam, and previously by Pink, Srbija danas, Nova, the subsite of the Telegraf – “eKlinika” and Mondo – “Lepa i sretna”, 025 and Penzionisani .