© 2006 The Royal College of Psychiatrists
Correspondence |
Chronomics of suicides and the solar wind
Halberg Chronobiology Center, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA
Halberg Chronobiology Center, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA.
Correspondence: Email: halbe001{at}tc.umn.edu
EDITED BY KIRIAKOS XENITIDIS and COLIN CAMPBELL
Salib & Cortina-Borja (2006) report an association between month of birth and suicides and this complements findings concerning the season of death in Minnesota. Along the scale of a calendar year, suicides peaked in April to June, which was later than mortality from heart disease and earlier than mortality from accidents. Our results from another continent, with a mid-continental climate, encourage generalisation to people born outside England and Wales. Both studies stacked data, at the outset of analyses, along the scale of the calendar year (Halberg, 1973) or as monthly counts (Salib & Cortina-Borja, 2006), a limitation subsequently remedied by focus upon broader chronomes (Halberg et al, 2005).
In unstacked data, chronomics resolves (along with trends and deterministic or other chaos) a spectrum of rhythms with many frequencies, in various fields (Halberg et al, 2001), including cis- and transyears, shorter or longer than a year (Halberg et al, 2005).
Richardson et al (1994) reported a periodicity of about 1.3 years for the speed of the solar wind measured by satellites. We found the same and other components of non-photic origin in physiological variables such as blood pressure and heart rate, each studied around the clock for up to decades (Halberg et al, 2001). Such components, also confirmed in the sigma of the speed and the proton content of the solar wind are variable, both in biomedicine and in physics, but they deserve the attention of those concerned with behaviour and can be revealed to the naked eye if the stacking is done after rather than before chronomics. The task remains to compare, before stacking, the chronomes of suicides at birth v. death on the same population and thereby to examine any contributions of space weather, among others, to a fatal as well as fetal hypothesis (Salib & Cortina-Borja, 2006), as attempted in Fig. 1, albeit with data from different populations.
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Fig. 1 (a) Suicides in Minnesota according to calendar date of death
(1968–2002); (b) suicides in England and Wales according to calendar
month of birth. *Validated non-linearly: period=0.727 years (95% CI
0.703–0.751). Data from Salib & Cortina-Borja
(2006).
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REFERENCES
- Halberg, F. (1973) Laboratory techniques and rhythmometry. In Biological Aspects of Circadian Rhythms (ed. J. N. Mills). pp. 1 –26. London: Plenum Press.
- Halberg, F., Cornélissen, G., Otsuka, K., et al (2001) Chronomics. Biomedicine and Pharmacotherapy, 55 (suppl. 1), 153–190.[CrossRef]
- Halberg, F., Cornélissen, G., Panksepp, J., et al (2005) Chronomics of autism and suicide. Biomedicine and Pharmacotherapy, 59 (suppl. 1), S100 –S108.[CrossRef]
- Richardson, J. D., Paularena, K. I., Belcher, J.W., et al (1994) Solar wind oscillations with a 1.3-year period. Geophysical Research Letters, 21, 1559 –1560.[CrossRef]
- Salib, E. & Cortina-Borja, M. (2006) Effect
of month of birth on the risk of suicide. British Journal of
Psychiatry, 188, 416
–422.
[Abstract/Free Full Text]
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