Over the years, science has responded to astrology by building up a series of studies that helps explain the relationship between a person’s month of birth and their susceptibility to different health conditions.
Naturally, a baby’s development begins in the womb, and the conditions they are exposed to play a huge role in their development. Maternal nutrition, in particular nutritional deficiencies, can greatly affect a child’s health and immunity.
Seasonal viruses can also impact fetal development, so a baby that develops during wintertime may be vulnerable to more early developmental setbacks than a baby that develops through the summer.
The study compared the birth dates and medical histories of 1.7 million patients against a grand total of 1,688 diseases. The patients’ records were gathered from New York-Presbyterian Hospital and Columbia University Medical Center (CUMC) and were dated between 1985 and 2013.
CUMC researchers discovered that 55 of the 1,688 diseases did, in fact, correlate with the season of birth. The reason? The time of year that a baby is born dictates many of the environmental factors that baby is exposed to during gestation, birth, and early development.
Spring Babies
This was reflected in the CUMC study’s findings. Columbia researchers found that people born in the United States in March faced the highest risk of nine different variants of heart disease including atrial fibrillation, congestive heart failure, and mitral valve disorder.
Summer Babies
“Children who were born in the summer were slightly heavier at birth, taller as adults, and went through puberty slightly later, relative to those born in winter months,” Ong explained.
Babies weighing more at birth, researchers found, experience delayed puberty. This in turn led to improved health outcomes for those people in adult life.
Fall Babies
The CUMC study discovered that individuals born in the fall were best protected against cardiovascular diseases.
Conversely, their vitamin D levels were lower and parathyroid hormone levels higher during the winter, without supplements. High levels of parathyroid hormone correlate with increased heart failure in elderly males, the study advised.
Winter Babies
Winter babies were also at a higher risk than their peers of developing neurological problems, according to the results of the CUMC study.
Do We Need Preventative Measures?
“Lifetime disease risk is affected by birth month,” CUMC researchers concluded. “Seasonally dependent early developmental mechanisms may play a role in increasing lifetime risk of disease.”However, the study’s authors added, it is important not to become overly anxious about the correlations between birth month and disease risk. There are significant associations, but the “overall disease risk,” they maintained, is “not that great.”
The next step for researchers is to expand their studies into other locations with other environmental factors around the world, enabling them to extrapolate data and make the fascinating findings relevant for everybody.
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