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The article presents the paper, the first of a series of reporting a five to fifteen year follow-up study of children with infantile psychoses, which attempts to provide a fairly detailed description of the children and their disorders in England. The group consisted of the 69 children who were all those who attended the Maudsley Hosspital between 1950 and 1958. The group is compared with a group of non-psychotic children who attended the same hospital at the same time, and who were individually matched for age, sex and intelligence levels.

A prospective epidemiological study of the Neonatal Hepatitis Syndrome in S.E. England showed Alpha-1-Antitrypsin Deficiency (Pi ZZ) to be present in seven out of fifty-two patients. Data are considered from these seven patients, and from a further six cases from outside this area. The nature of acute illness, pathological changes on early liver biopsy, and short-term prognosis show considerable variability, but in general the hepatitis is more severe in patients with Alpha-1-A.T. deficiency than in those in whom no aetiological factor was found. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article focuses on a longitudinal study of absence among long-service employees of three Merseyside firms. Most studies of the relationship between age and absence in industry are based on comparisons of the absence records of cross-sections of people in different age groups during a particular period, but groups of people with the same birth-dates may have characteristics in common other than age, arising, for example, from their having grown up and started work in similar social and economic conditions. The essential weakness of the cross-sectional method is that it does not preclude the possibility of absence differences being due to other factors. This weakness may be overcome by studying the absence history of one group of individuals over a long period. One study has in fact combined the cross-sectional and longitudinal methods and reports agreement between data obtained from the two methods showing that length of certified sickness absence was higher for older workers. But the investigators also observe that in the case of frequency of absence, however, the suggestion of the cross-sectional method that high absence frequency is a characteristic of younger people is not supported by the longitudinal evidence.

A 10-year follow-up of 327 civil servants with bronchitis (301 men and 26 women) is presented. A further 14 were lost sight of during the period, so that the follow-up was 96% complete. More than one half (54%) of the men died during the 10-year period, some 57% of the deaths being attributed to respiratory causes and a further 8% to carcinoma of the bronchus. Mortality from these diseases was higher than among the general population, but other causes of death showed the normal pattern. The degree of dyspnoea noted at the first interview gave a useful estimate of prognosis, the mild, moderate, and severe groups showing progressively higher death rates. Neither the length of history nor the age at onset of symptoms could be related to mortality. The proportion of smokers among the patients was greater than expected in the general population, and although this may have been a factor contributing to the excess mortality of the group as a whole, it was not possible to determine any effect of smoking within this study. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]