Anxiety over “superstitious” days may cost
lives
21 December 2001
LONDON By Deirdre Lee Superstitious days may increase the risk of death from heart disease due to an increase in psychological stress, US research suggests.
According to the research team at the University of California
at San Diego, Chinese and Japanese people are more likely to die from heart
disease on the fourth day of the month because the number four, which is
associated with death in some Eastern cultures, evokes superstitious anxiety.
The team are dubbing the phenomenon the “Hound of the Baskerville effect”
after the Sir Arthur Conan Doyle novel in which the character Charles
Baskerville dies from a heart attack induced by extreme psychological stress.
Researcher David Phillips and his colleagues compared the death certificates for
Chinese and Japanese Americans with white Americans from 1973 to 1998. They
discovered that on the fourth day of each month cardiac deaths among Chinese and
Japanese Americans were more frequent than on any other day of the month.
This effect was not repeated in white Americans and it did not hold true for
deaths caused by factors other than chronic heart disease among Chinese and
Japanese Americans, the team report in the British Medical Journal.
The fourth day peak did not seem to occur as a result of changes to the
patient’s diet, alcohol intake, exercise or drug treatment, the team say.
Instead, researchers are attributing the occurrence to the psychological stress
linked to the number four. This is what elicits additional deaths among this
particular population, they conclude.
“Our findings are consistent with the scientific literature and with a famous,
non-scientific story,” they write.
“The Baskerville effect exists both in fact and in fiction and suggests that
Conan Doyle was not only a great writer but a remarkable intuitive physician as
well.”
Reference: Phillips et al, BMJ 2001;323:1443-1446
© Health Media Ltd 2001
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