You’re More Likely To Die On Your Birthday, But Why? The Birthday Effect Explained
How do you like to celebrate your birthday? Do you go out with your friends, live it up, and have a night on the town? Or do you prefer to stay home, keeping your celebrations small, wanting to just spend a day relaxing?
As it turns out, the way you're celebrating might actually be dangerous. In fact, life in general might be dangerous around your birthday thanks to one spooky statistic that has left researchers stumped.
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Another Year Older
People have mixed feelings about their birthdays. Many love it, happy to celebrate another year's passing and let themselves live in the spotlight for a day, but others try to avoid it, either not liking the attention, the aging, or the tradition of it.
Those who dislike them might be onto something without even knowing it, for our birthdays play a vital role in a shocking and grim statistic. Say hello to the Birthday Effect, a phenomenon that states people are more likely to die the closer they are to their birthday.
A Deadly Date
This idea has been corroborated by multiple groups of researchers, the first of which was a 2012 study published in the Annals of Epidemiology journal. The study began as an attempt to explore the idea of death postponement, how someone who's ill might be able to extend their life long enough to enjoy another birthday.
They looked at the mortality data of roughly 2.4 million Swiss people between 1969 and 2008, and the results spelled the opposite of what they had hoped. There was a 13.8% increase in the potential for death on someone's birthday. For those aged 60 and over, that increase rises to 18%.
The Common Causes
While people initially believed this increase was due to suicides on birthdays, as attempts are more frequently made around holidays and milestones, suicide wasn't one of the leading causes of death found in this study. Instead, the main causes were long-gestating cardiovascular issues, illnesses like cancer, and accidents (they even concluded that men were 44% more likely to die via plummeting on their birthday).
"We concluded that birthdays end lethally more frequently than might be expected," the paper summarized.
A 2015 study from Social Science & Medicine did a similar process using United States data, which also revealed an increased chance of dying on one's own birthday, but only by 6.7%.
Up And Moving
So, why does this happen? What causes this strange phenomenon? Unfortunately, there's no one set answer, but there are some theories.
The first being that people are generally more physical on their birthday. Going out, partying, dancing, even just the excitement of celebrating your special day all puts stress on your cardiovascular system. These seemingly light activities could awaken a dormant or long-standing heart issue that results in a heart attack or other cardiac event.
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Downing Drinks
There's also the fact that people tend to drink on their birthdays more than most other days of the year. Being drunk certainly explains the rise in falls, slips, or other accidents that can result in death (especially if driving is thrown into the mix).
For those who are battling an illness, they might see an upcoming birthday as a milestone and want to strive to hit it before they pass, similar to the original idea for the Swiss study. They channel their strength to make it to their big day, then, once it's been met, that strength drops and their body succumbs to whatever it had been fighting so hard against.
Still Reason To Celebrate
Then, there's a more innocent theory, that a lot of people have their date of death recorded incorrectly, someone along the line accidentally putting the person's date of birth in the wrong spot. While this likely doesn't account for many of these cases, it could have still caused an impact on the final numbers.
Unfortunately, there's no one set reason why this seems to happen, and it's not likely there will ever be one. With so many people in the world, there will never be one set cause or reason for every death that happens on a given day.
This doesn't mean you should start to fear your birthday, though. There's no supernatural force out to get you. Just stay smart, stay safe, but still have fun!
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