PARIS, Dec 20: Chinese and Japanese who are convinced that the number four brings fatal bad luck could be signing their own death warrant.

Millions of Japanese and Chinese shun the number four because in Mandarin, Cantonese and Japanese the sound of the words “death” and “four” are almost identical.

The fear often translates into a refusal to travel on the fourth day of the month, avoidance of telephone numbers or car licence plates with fours in them, renumbering the fourth floor of a building and so on.

These people may well be right. For a detailed study now confirms there is indeed a far higher risk of death for Chinese and Japanese on the fourth day of the month.

But, it says, the cause is probably the stress on weak hearts, inflicted by the superstition itself.

Sociologists and mathematicians at the University of California at San Diego found that among Chinese and Japanese-Americans with chronic heart disease, there is a 50 per cent higher risk of dying on the fourth day of the month than on other days.

Among white Americans in the same condition, there was no such higher mortality, on that day of the month or any other, including the 13th, a number often viewed superstitiously in the West.

The researchers lyrically describe the syndrome as “The Hound of the Baskervilles Effect,” named after one of the characters in the Sherlock Holmes novel who has heart disease and expires from a heart attack brought on by stress.

“Our findings are consistent with the scientific literature and with a famous non-scientific story,” they write.

“The Baskerville effect exists both in fact and in fiction, and suggests that (author and doctor Sir Arthur) Conan Doyle was not only a great writer, but a remarkably intuitive physician as well.”

The study is based on computerized mortality statistics for the state of California, home to many Asian-Americans, between Jan 1, 1973, and Dec 31, 1998.

During this period, there were 209,908 recorded Chinese and Japanese deaths and 47,328,762 white American deaths.

In contrast to the stress-rousing fears of number four is the apparent benefit to health from rhythmic, spiritual recitation, according to a study, which is also published in Saturday’s British Medical Journal.—AFP