The findings, appearing in the December 22 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association, run counter to the widely held belief that some people are able to "cheat death" through sheer willpower or perhaps by some other, unknown psychosomatic mechanism.
DonnYoung, a biostatistician and research scientist in the OSU Comprehensive Cancer Center, along with Erinn Hade, a senior consulting research statistician in the OSU Center for Biostatistics, examined all death certificates in the Ohio Department of Health for the twelve-year period between 1989 and 2000, a total of over 1.2 million records. They selected for specific study only those records listing cancer as the leading cause of death. The process generated a database of 309,221 cancer deaths that were further identified by date of birth, gender, race and ethnicity.
An initial analysis of all deaths -- those due to cancer and non-cancerous causes revealed the lowest mortality rate occurring during the summer months, then escalating until it reached its highest level in the three weeks after Christmas. Young says this is a well-known and predictable seasonal pattern generally attributed to changing temperatures. "We've known for a long time that higher death rates are directly associated with falling temperatures."
Cancer mortality, however, showed no variation from season to season.
Conducting a second analysis of only the deaths from cancer, Young looked for what statisticians call a "dip/peak" phenomenon a decline in the death rate the week before an event with a corresponding increase in the week afterwards, an indication that something
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Contact: Michelle Gailiun
Gailiun.1@osu.edu
614-293-3737
Ohio State University
21-Dec-2004