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Re:Study finds connections between birth month and health by matthewmacleod on Wednesday June 10, 2015 @12:00PM (#9693166)
I'm surprised there's so much skepticism about this – it seems like an intuitively obvious result. The date on which a child is born will influence the environment in which they spend the early months of their lives – levels of sunlight exposure, temperature, allergens, pesticides and so on, both for the child and the mother. Given that, and knowledge that exposure to certain environments and chemicals can change the risk of health conditions later in life, it's hardly a big leap to demonstrate that correlation through a larger population-scale study.

I'd be far more surprised if there were no link!

Re:Study finds connections between birth month and health by vlasev on Wednesday June 10, 2015 @12:30PM (#9693409)
It says 55 conditions are correlated with the month, out of 1688. That's a rather small effect. The skepticism is well-warranted IMO. Also 39 of them have been shown to exist before this study so this is not strictly new knowledge either.
Re:Study finds connections between birth month and health by matthewmacleod on Wednesday June 10, 2015 @12:33PM (#9693425)
I don't quite understand your point – the number of conditions that are correlated isn't related to the effect size, is it?

I know it's not new knowledge – that's kind of why I'm unsure about the skepticism. We know that these effects already exists, and this is a wider-scale analysis of potential instances of those effects.