• DocumentCode
    2238733
  • Title

    Is there a relationship between sunspot numbers and psychiatric admissions?

  • Author

    Cohen, Marc ; Wohlers, Anthony

  • Author_Institution
    Dept. of Electr. & Comput. Syst. Eng., Monash Univ., Clayton, Vic., Australia
  • fYear
    1998
  • fDate
    15-18 Feb 1998
  • Firstpage
    149
  • Lastpage
    150
  • Abstract
    The authors examined the correlation between solar activity (sunspot numbers) and 96050 psychiatric admissions between July 1984 and December 1993, Victoria, Australia. Calculation of the Pearson correlation coefficient gave a value of 0.399 (P value; 0.0001). This value however, may be an artefact of autocorrelations within the two series rather than a relationship between them as the Pearson correlation does not account for the serial nature of the data. To overcome this problem the authors calculated the prewhitened cross-correlation between the series and tested whether they were uncorrelated. The test was significant (P value; 0.006), which gives strong evidence for a relationship between sunspot number and psychiatric admissions
  • Keywords
    biological effects of radiation; medicine; sunspots; Australia; Pearson correlation; Pearson correlation coefficient; Victoria; autocorrelations artefact; prewhitened cross-correlation; psychiatric admissions; solar activity; sunspot numbers; Australia; Autocorrelation; Biomedical engineering; Biomedical informatics; Databases; Hospitals; Magnetic field measurement; Psychology; Systems engineering and theory; Testing;
  • fLanguage
    English
  • Publisher
    ieee
  • Conference_Titel
    Bioelectromagnetism, 1998. Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on
  • Conference_Location
    Melbourne, Vic.
  • Print_ISBN
    0-7803-3867-7
  • Type

    conf

  • DOI
    10.1109/ICBEM.1998.666439
  • Filename
    666439