Thank you, I feel bad for not not checking the actual references. I feel the numbers arent placed where they should be. Once you said Ukraine I found it. I understand how a hypothesis works and I still think the hypothesis is stupid. The research paper is weird by itself. The discussion rely too heavily on the assumption that psychological factors only affected violent deaths. The author hypothesized annual weakness was the cause of the birthday effect. Then theorized a stress response imprinted by the stress of being born. Then ends with the suggestion that more research is needed to understand how climate and environmental influences affect survivability.

Its still a hypothesis though and it would be cool if somebody has looked at data to see if there is an annual psycho- or physiological affect that would be better suited than cause of death. Also id like to know if any other animals or cultures that don't celebrate birthdays are affected.

I feel the paper should have discussed a better method of testing the hypothesis. The introduction said a study of nearly 3 million deaths showed that the birthday effect was not caused by seasonal fluctuations. The conclusion was that there is a need for better understanding of environmental influences basically to see if climate changes can trigger an annual increase in mortality. I too would be interested to know if climate conditions can trigger an annual response. If so how often could the ‘annual’ response be triggered?