Babies born in Autumn likelier to live to 100

London, July 24 (ANI): Autumn babies born between the months of September and November are more likely to cross the 100th milestone, a new study has revealed.

Gathering data from 1500 centenarians born between 1880 and 1895 within the United States, researchers at the University of Chicago discovered that the majority of these people were born in The Fall.

The new research confirms that the month in which you were born and the environment and temperature into which you arrive will affect your behaviour, your genetics and your longevity .

Previous studies into life spans and date-of-birth had also indicated that children born in autumn stand a better chance of living longer, but researchers felt that the economic factors such as wealth might have made the result uneven.

Working on data from 1880 to 1895, Leonid Garilov and Natalia Gavrilova at the University of Chicago compared the birth dates and life spans of centenarian's siblings and spouses.

They supposed that siblings would have experienced similar early environment and genetic backgrounds as the century-makers and that their spouses would have shared similar experiences later in life.

The pair's data revealed that more centenarians were born in the autumn than in the spring or any other time of year.

Checking the birth rates month-to-month to see whether more people were born in autumn months than any other, they found no significant fluctuations.

Most people who lived till they were 100-years-old were born between September and November and the fewest number were born in March, May and July.

The duo also found that the results for the autumn century-makers was more pronounced for children who were born between 1880 and 1889 than those born between 1889 and 1895.

"The most popular hypothesis to explain the finding is that seasonal infections in early life are creating long-lasting damage to human health," the Daily Mail quoted Gavrilo, who recently presented his work to the Population Association of America in San Francisco, as saying.

Gavrilov attributed the other possible reasons for the findings to seasonal vitamin deficiency or seasonal variation of hormone levels.

Backing up his data historically, Gavrilov found that his data holds true in the years after 1889 too.

"Mortality from infectious diseases was decreasing over time during the end of the 19th century and this particularly the case for summer infections," Gavrilov added. (ANI)