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Abstract
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Theoretical Background: The research of suicide examine the possible risk factors of suicide in a very wide aspect. Researches that examined the possible impact of lunar-cycles to suicide have been published as far back as the 60-s. The earlier works in this topic brought mixed results, but they rather strengthen the hypothesis that the full moon what these works mainly focused on, has no significant impact on suicide. The solar activities like sun eruptions and their impact to earth (like geomagnetic storms) is a less researched topic in the aspect of suicide. But the recent results showed, that there is a possible correlation between these phenomenon, although the "working mechanism" has been left blank in these works.
AIM: The aim of this study is to examine the impact of moon phases, sun eruptions and geomagnetic storms to suicide. The daily time series of more than 30 years of suicide data (used in this paper) yield a unique possibility to us to examine this research question in a more detailed way compared to other works.
METHODS: In this paper we examine the daily normed suicide rates (12784 days) between 1976 and 2010, from the aspect of lunar cycles, sun eruptions and geomagnetic storms. In the case of suicide time series beside the normed suicide rates (based on yearly population size), the paper also examine the seasonal decomposed suicide time series (from where we removed the trend and season effects). In the case of lunar cycle we focus on the full moon, in the case of sun eruptions we examine all the measurable sun eruptions and also the strong ones (M/X), and in the case of geomagnetic storms we distinguish the medium (AP > 39) and strong (AP > 100) ones. We compare the daily mean of suicide in the days of event and the days without the phenomenon, with t/Welch statistic probes, and also with the "rank" types of these probes.
RESULTS: The results of the full moon part of the paper indicated that there was no correlation between moon phases and suicide (the effect was only significant in the female data, and only in the normed models). The examination of sun eruptions and geomagnetic storms showed more significant results, also in the level of whole population, and in the male and female part of it. But this effect could be caused by the correlations of season components, because the above results haven't occurred in the models based on the detrended and desesonalized time series.
CONCLUSION: In the case of sun eruptions and geomagnetic storms it seems that it is worth to continue the researches with more complex statistical methods. © 2016 Akadémiai Kiadó, Budapest.
Language: hu |