Social science & medicine
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This paper poses three questions: (1) Does mortality from natural causes spike around Christmas and New Year? (2) If so, does this spike exist for all major disease groups or only specialized groups? (3) If twin holiday spikes exist, need this imply that Christmas and New Year are risk factors for death? To answer these questions, we used all official U. S. death certificates, 1979-2004 (n = 57,451,944) in various hospital settings to examine daily mortality levels around Christmas and New Year. We measured the Christmas increase by comparing observed deaths with expected deaths in the week starting on Christmas. ⋯ In the two weeks starting with Christmas, there is an excess of 42,325 deaths from natural causes above and beyond the normal winter increase. Christmas and New Year appear to be risk factors for deaths from many diseases. We tested nine possible explanations for these risk factors, but further research is needed.