Postponement of death around Chinese holidays: a Hong Kong perspective

Historical anecdotes suggest human beings can postpone death around important occasions. Some formal studies have claimed that elderly Jewish men and Chinese women in America postponed death around the Passover and Harvest Moon (or Mid-Autumn) Festival (HMF), respectively.

We examined deaths from cancer, cerebrovascular and heart diseases in the Chinese around four important holidays celebrated in Hong Kong. From computerised data in 1995-2000, the expected weekly deaths for 12 weeks before and after Lunar New Year, Ching Ming, HMF and Chung Yeung holidays were calculated using a polynomial regression model for the three diseases in men and women, under and over the age of 75 years. The differences in the observed deaths one week before and one week after the four holidays were tested by the binomial test.

There were significantly fewer deaths overall in men before the holidays than after (p-value equals 0.0081), with most of the difference being due to cancer deaths, particularly among men over 75 years of age. For women, there were actually more deaths before than after the holidays. The data, stratified according to age, gender, disease and holiday, yielded only five out of 48 variables with a p-value of less than 0.05, which was slightly above chance, considering the large number of comparisons made. In four of the five situations, there were significantly fewer deaths before than after the holidays; but after Bonferroni correction, only the finding of fewer cancer deaths for men aged over 75 years before HMF was significant.

Other than cancer deaths in males, we found little evidence in this dataset of death postponement until after important holidays in the Hong Kong Chinese population.