Lunar cycle effect on patient visit to psychiatry hospital emergency room: studying the ‘Transylvanian effect’ in an Islamic society
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The belief of the effect of the full moon on mental illness is well established in western societies. Studies made in the past have shown conflicting results. Both psychological and biological theories have been proposed in trying to explain the myth. In our study, we examined the lunar cycle effect on patients with mental illness attending the emergency room (ER) in a psychiatric hospital in Kuwait. We included Muslim patients only. As the notion of the effect of lunar cycle on mental illness is not held in Islam, our study acted as a blind control study examining if there is a real biological basis for the myth. Patients' visits were classified according to age, gender, day of visit, lunar phase and diagnosis or presenting complaint. There were no statistical differences in the number of ER visits by all patients during the different moon phases. There were differences in the number of ER visits between the different diagnoses and presenting complaints, with depression most common and catatonia the least common. We conclude, therefore, that the lunar cycle has no influence on ER visits by patients with mental illness and if there is such an effect, then it is mostly psychological rather than biological.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".