Being a summer baby to have higher birth weight and late puberty

Finally, Perry says, “This is the first time puberty timing has been robustly linked to seasonality”. He added, “Our results show [that the] birth month has a measurement effect on development and health”.

United Kingdom researchers found that babies born during summer months are healthier adults.

Furthermore, the study found that girls born in summer months actually started puberty later, which is an indication of better health in adulthood. We were surprised, and pleased, to see how similar the patterns were on birth weight and puberty timing. A study published earlier this year in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Associationfound that people born in May have the lowest risk of developing disease, while those born in October had the highest.

These marker can have an effect on development and overall health later in daily living.

Why summer-born females grow up healthier than females born at other times remains unclear; however, the researchers hypothesized it may have something to do with the amount of sunlight (and thus, vitamin D) the babies’ mothers received during the early stages of their pregnancies. “Our results show that birth month has a measurable effect on development and health, but more work is needed to understand the mechanisms behind this effect”, Perry said.

Dr. Nicholas Tatonetti, a biomedical informatics researcher at Columbia University who wasn’t part in the study, said that the new findings do not provide a guide to when to have babies, but what external elements influence our health on the long-term.

The study also picked up variations in educational achievement based on month of birth with academic success rising sharply in the autumn, believed to be caused by the difference in ages of the school year.

Previous studies have found that people born in November are far less likely to develop Multiple Sclerosis than those born in May, which has again been linked to vitamin D.

Numerous studies have evaluated the association between birth month and the risk for developing certain diseases.

For their analysis, the researchers used data from the UK Biobank, a database that contains detailed health information on more than half a million United Kingdom adults who were aged between 40 and 69 at the time of their enrolment in the study (2006 to 2010).