- 著者
-
近藤 良
- 出版者
- 日本先天異常学会
- 雑誌
- 日本先天異常学会会報 (ISSN:00372285)
- 巻号頁・発行日
- vol.20, no.1, pp.7-16, 1980-03-30 (Released:2019-02-01)
"Hinoe-Uma" is the name of a year recurring in a sixty-year cycle in the ancient Japanese calender, and is characterized by a superstition that it is an evil omen for girls to be born in this year. In 1966, the year of "Hinoe Uma" live births m Japan decreased to 1,360,974, in contrast with 1,823,697 and 1,935,647 in the preceding and the following years, respectively. In 1966, the infant mortality rate from congenital anomalies rose to 22.6 per 10,000 live births from 19.8 in the preceding year and it returned to 19.2 in the following year. Whether there was an actual rise of risk or not should be a problem, because when the number of live births changes rapidly from one year to the next, infant mortality rate computed by a conventional method does not provide an accurate measure of risk of death during the first year of life. The author tried to obtain accurate measures of the risk using data on the number of infant deaths by age subdivisions from Vital Statistics in Japan 1965 to 1967. Adjusted infant mortality rates from congenital anomalies were 20.0, 21.2 and 20.5 per 10,000 live births in 1965, 1966 and 1967, respectively. It can therefore be concluded that there was no significant rise in the actual risk of infant deaths from congenital anomalies as a whole and from each kind of anomalies in 1966.