Libras, Watch Your Pelvises! Study Links Astrological Signs to Disease, But...

Attention all Libras: Walk carefully. You seem to have a higher risk of fracturing your pelvis than people born under other astrological signs.

Pisces? Heart failure is more likely to hit you than other people. And stay clear of Virgos when they've got a bun in the oven -- they have a higher risk of vomiting during pregnancy.

All right, calm down. This isn't a real scientific study. Or at least, it isn't a serious one. OK, it is serious, but you're not supposed to think that being a Leo or whatever will actually affect your health.

To show how connections can appear in research when they don't actually exist, researchers in Canada found that people born under each of 12 astrological signs were more likely to develop certain diseases. (This all came from an analysis of hospital records of 10 million Ontario residents.)

I wasn't able to attend the session on this earlier today at theannual meeting of American Association for the Advancement of Sciencehere in San Francisco, but here are some details from a press release:

“Replaceastrological signs with another characteristic such as gender or age,
and immediately your mind starts to form explanations for the observedassociations,” says [a researcher]. “Then we leap to conclusions, constructingreasons for why we saw the results we did. We did this study to prove alarger point – the more we look for patterns, the more likely we are tofind them, particularly when we don’t begin with a particular question.”...

What he found was that even though eachastrological sign had its own unique disorders, his initial resultswere not reproduced when they were explicitly tested in a secondpopulation.

“Scientists take pains to make sure their clinicalstudies are conducted accurately,” [he says], “but sometimeserroneous conclusions will be obtained solely due to chance.”
Statistical chance means that 5 per cent of the time, scientists willincorrectly conclude that an association exists, when in reality nosuch association exists in the population that the scientists arestudying.

One way to reduce the chances of drawing a wrong conclusion is to try and reproduce unexpected results in further studies.

“Thereis a danger in basing scientific decisions on the results of one study,
particularly if the results were unanticipated or the association wasone that we did not initially decide to examine,” says Austin. “Butwhen several studies all arrive at similar conclusions, we reduce therisk of arriving at an incorrect outcome.”

Charting our health [press release]