Using a giant dataset, researchers have found that the month you were born in can determine the risk factor of you developing certain diseases across your lifetime
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One of the wonderful aspects of living in the age of Big Data is the way scientists are able to discover new, previously undiscovered patterns in gigantic datasets. A team at Columbia University has studied the health records of over ten million people across three different countries and discovered some compelling links between a person’s lifetime disease risk and the month they were born in.

Numerous researchers have tackled the strangely interesting correlations between birth month and disease risk over the years. The true goal of this research is to fundamentally understand what specific seasonal and environmental factors faced by a mother during pregnancy can affect an offspring’s lifelong susceptibility to certain disease.

These links are undeniably tricky to study. A conventional medical study involving groups of subjects would not be especially ethical, after all, we couldn’t exactly withhold a certain environmental factor from […]

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