December 21, 2004
Study Says Death Does Not Take a Holiday
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

CHICAGO (AP) -- Death takes no holiday, according to a study that
challenges the widely held notion that dying people can somehow hold
on until after Christmas or other important events in their lives.

Donn Young, a biostatistician at Ohio State University's Comprehensive
Cancer Center who studied more than 300,000 cancer patients, said the
supposed phenomenon is mostly based on wishful thinking and selective
memories.

``The mind does play a role in illness,'' he said. ``But the idea that
death is something that an individual patient can control by sheer
force of will -- just from looking at the data, this doesn't appear to
be so.''

Some doctors and nurses who work with gravely ill people are not
convinced by the findings, arguing that the statistics do not tell the
human side of the story.

Young and statistician Erinn Hade looked at Ohio death certificates
for people who died of cancer from 1989 to 2000 and analyzed how many
deaths occurred before and after three dates -- Christmas,
Thanksgiving and the person's birthday.

``If there was an effect, you'd see a dip before ... and an increase
after,'' Young said. But there was no dip, and no significant
difference in the proportion of cancer patients dying before an event
and those dying after.

The study was published in Wednesday's Journal of the American Medical
Association.

``I can't believe they'd put this out right before Christmas,'' said
Dr. Daniel Loiterstein, a specialist in geriatric psychiatry at Rush
University Medical Center in Chicago. ``It's like walking around and
telling people there's no Santa Claus.''

Loiterstein said the study does not take into account individual
situations and fails to consider that events other than holidays might
be more important for some dying patients.

``We have all had the experience of watching a patient wanting to be
there for their daughter's wedding day, a grandfather wanting to be
there for the grandson's bar mitzvah or a Communion,'' Loiterstein
said. ``I don't think we should ever discount the power of hope and
the power of these emotional events to move patients.''

Other studies supporting the phenomenon include University of
California at San Diego sociologist David Phillips' research showing
declines in death rates among Jewish men before Passover and among
elderly Chinese women before the Harvest Moon Festival.

Young said it is possible that the numbers of people wanting to hang
on were evenly balanced by those wishing to die before the event. But
he doubts it.

``I just don't think that a patient wishes to die `early' and `to get
it over with' -- particularly when we seem to put an emphasis on a
courageous `fight' against cancer,'' he said.

Nancy Whetstone, a Columbus, Ohio, executive whose parents both died
in 1999 between Thanksgiving and Christmas, said she agrees with the
findings.

``I don't think people hang on for a specific event; I think when it's
their time, it's their time,'' she said.

But Pauline King, a nurse at Ohio State's Arthur G. James Cancer
Hospital, recalled an ailing, single mother of four who had advanced
breast cancer and managed to fulfill her wish to survive until after
her daughter's 18th birthday.

``Maybe it happens less than we think, but when it happens, it sticks
in your mind,'' King said. ``These people have a raison d'etre.''

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