Effect of birth season on longevity: Thrifty and hopeful phenotypes in historical quebec
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVES: Individuals with fetal growth restrictions may become unhealthy as adult if they live in a nutritionally rich environment. Yet, there is little evidence for the counterpart that profuse resources during early development may prove detrimental in an impoverished adult environment. Using birth season as a proxy for nutrition in utero, this study tests whether early life effects on longevity are conditional on the environment in which people reside during adulthood. METHODS: I used Cox proportional hazard models of mortality after the age of 60 years among historical cohorts of French Canadian women born before 1750. Models are stratified by siblings to adjust the results for unobserved factors shared by family members. RESULTS: A birth during winter conferred the best-survival prospects in the south of the Saint-Lawrence River but the worse prospects in the north, where a birth during the fall was associated with the lowest mortality. Women who migrated to live on the other side of the river lost whatever advantage or disadvantage they had from their birth season and faced increases or decreases in risk that were specific to their new location. CONCLUSIONS: Based on Hales and Barker's thrifty phenotype hypothesis, and adding the "hopeful phenotype" counterpart, this study suggests that cues from the external environment during development are highly specific to that environment and that the slightest change of location may affect the chances for survival into old age. I finally address the role of fertility as a possible mediator or modifier of the effect of birth season on longevity.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".