Observable variations in human sex ratio at birth

• Main Authors: Chen, Q. (Author), Larsson, H. (Author), Long, Y. (Author), Rzhetsky, A. (Author)
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Public Library of Science 2021
• Subjects: agriculture; air pollutant; air pollution; Air Pollution; American; Article; biology; birth; cluster analysis; Cluster Analysis; Computational Biology; controlled study; electronic medical record; environmental temperature; epidemiology; female; Female; global health; Global Health; human; Humans; industry and industrial phenomena; Infant, Newborn; male; Male; Models, Statistical; newborn; population dynamics; Population Dynamics; procedures; public health; Public Health; register; regression analysis; Regression Analysis; seasonal variation; sex ratio; Sex Ratio; statistical model; Sweden; Swedish citizen; toxin; United States; water pollutant; water pollution; Water Pollution
• Online Access: View Fulltext in Publisher

 The human sex ratio at birth (SRB), defined as the ratio between the number of newborn boys to the total number of newborns, is typically slightly greater than 1/2 (more boys than girls) and tends to vary across different geographical regions and time periods. In this large-scale study, we sought to validate previously-reported associations and test new hypotheses using statistical analysis of two very large datasets incorporating electronic medical records (EMRs). One of the datasets represents over half (* 150 million) of the US population for over 8 years (IBM Watson Health MarketScan insurance claims) while another covers the entire Swedish population (* 9 million) for over 30 years (the Swedish National Patient Register). After testing more than 100 hypotheses, we showed that neither dataset supported models in which the SRB changed seasonally or in response to variations in ambient temperature. However, increased levels of a diverse array of air and water pollutants, were associated with lower SRBs, including increased levels of industrial and agricultural activity, which served as proxies for water pollution. Moreover, some exogenous factors generally considered to be environmental toxins turned out to induce higher SRBs. Finally, we identified new factors with signals for either higher or lower SRBs. In all cases, the effect sizes were modest but highly statistically significant owing to the large sizes of the two datasets. We suggest that while it was unlikely that the associations have arisen from sex-specific selection mechanisms, they are still useful for the purpose of public health surveillance if they can be corroborated by empirical evidences. Copyright: © 2021 Long et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.