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. 1987 Jun;41(2):121-6.
doi: 10.1136/jech.41.2.121.

Birthday and date of death

M C Angermeyer  1 , L Kühn, P Osterwald
Affiliations

Birthday and date of death

M C Angermeyer et al. J Epidemiol Community Health. 1987 Jun.

Abstract

The relation between birthday and date of death has so far been studied from two different perspectives: birthdays were either conceived of as emotionally invested deadlines motivating people to ward off their death which causes a 'dip' in death rates before their birthday, or they were considered as stressful events leading to an increase of mortality on or after their birthday. Using a collection of biographies of famous people from the whole world and another of well-known Swiss citizens we tested hypotheses derived from these assumptions. Neither the 'death-dip' hypotheses nor the 'birthday stress' hypothesis was supported by our results.

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