What's in a name?

[Loren Pechtel]

Children's Nomenclatural Adventurism and Medical Evaluation study - PubMed

Our data confirm the impression that children with certain categories of first names have an increased likelihood of admission to hospital after presenting to the ED. We speculate that our findings, which are in concordance with those from educational and psychological literature, may reflect...

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

I've been attacked before for suggesting that names might actually say something about the person. (Common factor: the parents.) Well, turns out someone noticed that in a medical context 15 years ago.

Named after a popular culture figure: 1.91 risk ratio vs average for hospital admission. In other words, almost twice as likely to end up in the hospital.

 

[bilby]

Children's Nomenclatural Adventurism and Medical Evaluation study - PubMed

Our data confirm the impression that children with certain categories of first names have an increased likelihood of admission to hospital after presenting to the ED. We speculate that our findings, which are in concordance with those from educational and psychological literature, may reflect...

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

I've been attacked before for suggesting that names might actually say something about the person. (Common factor: the parents.) Well, turns out someone noticed that in a medical context 15 years ago.

Named after a popular culture figure: 1.91 risk ratio vs average for hospital admission. In other words, almost twice as likely to end up in the hospital.

The authors appear to have the causation backwards, if any causation even exists for this pair of correlated observations:

We speculate that our findings, which are in concordance with those from educational and psychological literature, may reflect socio-economic status and/or a 'self-fulfilling prophecy'. Further research may make it possible to assign names an RR rating (e.g. for hospital admission in the first 16 years of life), thus providing parents with another factor to consider when choosing names for their children.

It strikes me as resonable to expect that parents choosing a different name, as a result of such a rating scheme, would have no effect on the outcomes for specific children, as the name is almost certainly symptomatic, not causative.

More studies are of course needed.

Indeed. But it could be unwise to fund these specific researchers to do those studies.

In other words, almost twice as likely to end up in the hospital.

Twice not very likely, is not very likely.