A study conducted at the University of Zurich and published in the Annals of Epidemiology suggests that people are more likely to die on their birthdays than on other days. Or, as one of the study’s authors puts it, drily, “Birthdays end lethally more frequently than might be expected.”
Gizmodo summarizes the paper: Researchers analyzed
data from more than two million people over the age of 40. [The study] showed that people are 18.6 percent more likely to die of heart attack on their birthdays, while the risk of stroke shoots up by 21.5 percent. There was also a 34.9 percent rise in suicides and a 44 percent rise in deaths from falls on birthdays.
Why? A British researcher quoted in the Telegraph offers two theories:
Scholars say they’ve confirmed an unsettling paradox: Places that have the happiest citizenry also have the highest suicide rates.
That puzzling pattern has been observed in individual nations, but is often explained by purely local reasons: Short days and harsh winters in Scandinavia, for example, are blamed for high levels of self-killing in those otherwise contented lands. But using data on life satisfaction from the World Values Survey, and on suicide from the World Health Organization, researchers found that the correlation between happiness and suicide held across 21 countries: 17 in Europe plus the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Neither climate nor religiosity appeared to be factors. …
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Gary Rosen is the editor of Review and the former managing editor of Commentary magazine. His articles and reviews have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times. He is the author of "American Compact: James Madison and the Problem of Founding" and the editor of "The Right War? The Conservative Debate on Iraq."