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. 2013 Dec 12:347:f6627.
doi: 10.1136/bmj.f6627.

The Brady Bunch? New evidence for nominative determinism in patients' health: retrospective, population based cohort study

John J Keaney  1 , John D Groarke, Zita Galvin, Catherine McGorrian, Hugh A McCann, Declan Sugrue, Edward Keelan, Joseph Galvin, Gavin Blake, Niall G Mahon, James O'Neill
Affiliations

The Brady Bunch? New evidence for nominative determinism in patients' health: retrospective, population based cohort study

John J Keaney et al. BMJ. .

Abstract

Objective: To ascertain whether a name can influence a person's health, by assessing whether people with the surname "Brady" have an increased prevalence of bradycardia.

Design: Retrospective, population based cohort study.

Setting: One university teaching hospital in Dublin, Ireland.

Participants: People with the surname "Brady" in Dublin, determined through use of an online telephone directory.

Main outcome measure: Prevalence of participants who had pacemakers inserted for bradycardia between 1 January 2007 and 28 February 2013.

Results: 579 (0.36%) of 161,967 people who were listed on the Dublin telephone listings had the surname "Brady." The proportion of pacemaker recipients was significantly higher among Bradys (n=8, 1.38%) than among non-Bradys (n=991, 0.61%; P=0.03). The unadjusted odds ratio (95% confidence interval) for pacemaker implantation among individuals with the surname Brady compared with individuals with other surnames was 2.27 (1.13 to 4.57).

Conclusions: Patients named Brady are at increased risk of needing pacemaker implantation compared with the general population. This finding shows a potential role for nominative determinism in health.

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Conflict of interest statement

Funding: There was no specific funding for this study.

Competing interests: All authors have completed the ICMJE uniform disclosure form at www.icmje.org/coi_disclosure.pdf and declare: no support from any organisation for the submitted work; Actelion Pharmaceuticals awarded JJK a Newman fellowship in translational medicine and pulmonary hypertension in July 2011, for two years (€35 000 per year), which was used to fund his salary while working as a full time research registrar in the Mater Hospital and while working towards an MD; Actelion Pharmaceuticals did not have any influence over the topic of JJK’s research; no other relationships or activities that could appear to have influenced the submitted work.

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