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Is Wednesday's child filled with woe? An evidence‐based reassessment
Author(s) -
Buckley Nicholas A,
McDonald Janelle A,
Foy Hilary,
Whyte Ian M,
Dawson Andrew H
Publication year - 1995
Publication title -
medical journal of australia
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.904
H-Index - 131
eISSN - 1326-5377
pISSN - 0025-729X
DOI - 10.5694/j.1326-5377.1995.tb124800.x
Subject(s) - medical school , medicine , general hospital , family medicine , library science , medical education , computer science
To the Editor: Local obstetricians brought to our notice their patients' anxieties about the day their children were delivered . This may have been fuelled by the recent publicity given, almost every night, to the notorious child killer Wednesday Addams. Parental ambitions and fears for the disposition of a child, founded on the above well known but poorly substantiated hypotheses, were perceived to be leading to excessive requests for elective caesareans and inductions of labour on Tuesdays (Catholics), Saturdays (Protestants), Sundays (same-sex couples) and Fridays (everybody else). It is not known whether manipulation of operating lists by some parents has contributed to the current crisis in surgery waiting lists. Aware of our research interest in factors that predispose to suicide attempts.tthe aforementioned obstetricians suggested we might be able to provide clear evidence to refute or confirm fears that Wednesday's children were more likely to overdose or have depression than patients born on other days of the week. To this end, we retrospectively analysed data entered into our database, described elsewhere." for the period 1 July 1991 to 30 June 1995 . Of 2450 patients who presented after selfpoisoning, 369 (15.1 %) had been born on a Wednesday. Unexpectedly, patients born on Tuesdays (387; 15.8%) were most likely to have poisoned themselves perhaps Grace is the brand name of a drug (it's difficult to keep track of new antihypertensive agents). Those born on Saturday (310; 12.7%) were least likely to present with poisoning. We were unable to compare these results with those for a control group who did not overdose, and these results may reflect elective delivery preferences from 20-40 years ago. Of those born on a Wednesday, 96 (26%) were diagnosed with a depressivedisorder, compared with 27.7% of the whole cohort. Those born on Saturday had similar rates of employment (18%) and unemployment (34%), compared with those born on all other days (18% and 32%, respectively) . From these findings and our previous analyses? of the rates of drug and alcohol abuse, psychiatric morbidity, unemployment and poisoning, we were able to more accurately define the usual characteristics of people who overdose on the basis of their day of birth. Thus we offer the following evidence-based rhyme :