Season of birth and handedness in Serbian high school students 英文参考文献.docVIP

Annals of General Psychiatry BioMedCentral Primary research Open Access Season of birth and handedness in Serbian high school students Sanja Milenkovi?*?1, Daniel Rock?2,3, Milan Dragovi??2,3 and Aleksandar Janca?2 Address: 1Institute for Hygiene and Medical Ecology, School of Medicine, University of Belgrade, Serbia, 2School of Psychiatry and Clinical Neurosciences, University of Western Australia, Australia and 3Centre for Clinical Research in Neuropsychiatry, Graylands Hospital, Western Australia, Australia Email: Sanja Milenkovi?* - sanjavecko@; Daniel Rock - daniel.rock@.au; Milan Dragovi? - milan.dragovic@.au; Aleksandar Janca - jancaa@.au * Corresponding author ?Equal contributors Published: 30 January 2008 Received: 13 November 2007 Accepted: 30 January 2008 Annals of General Psychiatry 2008, 7:2 doi:10.1186/1744-859X-7-2 This article is available from: /content/7/1/2 ? 2008 Milenkovi? et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Abstract Background: Although behavioural dominance of the right hand in humans is likely to be under genetic control, departures from this population norm, i.e. left- or non-right-handedness, are believed to be influenced by environmental factors. Among many such environmental factors including, for example, low birth weight, testosterone level, and maternal age at birth, season of birth has occasionally been investigated. The overall empirical evidence for the season of birth effect is mixed. Methods: We have investigated the effect of season of birth in an epidemiologically robust sample of randomly selected young people (n = 977), all born in the same year. A Kolmogorov-Smirnov type statistical test was used to determine season of birth.