DST and Death
September 20, 2018•356 words
DST and Death Research
Matt Parker (who is, for me, famed for supplying the game Set (that the kids love), and non-transitive dice), recently posted a short YouTube video on some research into daylight savings time (DST) changes and changes in mortality rates.
It's an interesting topic, and anecdotes (and potentially evidence) abound for how traumatic this might be; the big question here, though, is whether or not DST changes actually cause death; presumably, the implicit question is whether or not having seasonal DST changes reduce mortality.
The research he talked about looked at some particular instances of acute myocardial infarction (AMI), and examined changes due to DST. The work is available under a Creative Commons licence.
Disclaimer
However, there is a decent disclaimer in the work; namely, "nominally significant results should be interpreted as hypothesis generating, rather than confirmatory evidence". This is fine, of course, but part of the context of the discussion right now is that the EU is proposing ditching DST, and any research that confirms mortality rate changes feels relevant to significant changes affecting such a wide population.
Applying Research Results
The first thing that came to my mind here was that the results were obtained in Michigan, US, sitting at latitude 41° 41' N to 48° 18' N. The EU, on the other hand, looks (by my quick Wikipedia lookup), to sit between 36° 0’ 15” N (Punta de Tarifa, Spain) and 70° 5’ 30” N (Nuorgam, Finland). My guess would be that more northern EU latitudes would be more affected by DST changes and more equatorial ones less so.
Additionally, of course, we're only looking at AMI instances; the research (very explicitly) does not cover other mortality causes, or indeed other medical or other problems that might be associated with DST. I'm now interested in how these might be affected (as indeed I am interested in such things every year, albeit briefly).
Summer All Year
As an aside, Jean-Claude Juncker apparently told ZDF, "we should have summertime all year round". Well, yes, that would be lovely, but I don't think we're going to get that by doing this.