[joemi]

I'm not sure if what you're talking about has anything to do with the article. It sounds like you're just making a flippant comment based on the title of the article (please correct me if I'm wrong). From the article:

> Most states have arbitrary cutoffs for kindergarten entry, with children who do not reach a given age by a certain date required to wait a year. In 18 states, children who will turn 5 before Sept. 1 can enter kindergarten in the year that they turn 5; children who will turn 5 after Sept. 1 must wait until the next year. So in states with Sept. 1 cutoffs, in any given class, August-born children will usually be the youngest and September-born children the oldest. These arbitrary cutoffs have important implications for the diagnosis of A.D.H.D.

[caddemon]

There are also other reasons birth month could be related to psychiatric disease that sound more pseudoscience-y at first. There's good reason to believe that infection at the wrong time of pregnancy can increase risk of Schizophrenia for example, meaning that the alignment of cold and flu season could affect disease rates by birth month.

I agree the comment was probably just being sarcastic, but I think it's worth noting that there could be a more biological component to an effect like this, doesn't need to be a societal environment/diagnosis rate thing to be plausible.

It's interesting reading about a lot of pseudoscience as you go through scientific training, because obviously you have an immediate negative reaction to it. But I've started to notice that more often than not there is some underlying grain of truth that is taken to an extreme and/or given a ridiculous explanation. This in turn dampens real research on the potentially interesting line of questioning.