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A study was conducted to investigate and evaluate the familial aggregation of pyloric stenosis, the most common condition requiring surgery in the first months of life, and the role of heritability in the disease. Results indicated that the disease found in Danish children showed strong familial aggregation as well as heritability.

A study is conducted to evaluate the relationship between routinely administered childhood vaccines and hospitalization for nontargeted infectious diseases. The results of the study do not support the hypotheses that multiple-antigen vaccines or aggregated vaccine exposure increase the risk of nontargeted infections disease hospitalization.

Millions of children are vaccinated with the measles, mumps, rubella (MMR) vaccine annually and the safety of this vaccine is of prime concern to researchers with tests being conducted to estimate incidence rate ratios (RRs) following this vaccination. It was found that there is an increased rate of febrile seizures after MMR vaccination but the risk difference was smaller in high-risk children.

Vaccines that contain thimerosal probably do not increase the risk of autism in children who receive them, according to a study of 467,450 Danish children born between 1990 and 1996. There was no increase in the number of children with autism in the group that received vaccines containing thimerosal compared to the group that received vaccines without thimerosal. Thimerosal is a mercury compound used as a preservative.

Children who were vaccinated with BCG vaccine as babies are just as likely to develop an allergic disease as those who are not. BCG is a tuberculosis vaccine. Doctors believed BCG vaccine might protect children from developing an allergic disease, but a study of 1,575 children in Greenland shows that this is not true. Greenland stopped vaccinating babies with BCG in 1990.

Importance: Women with hypertensive disorders of pregnancy, preeclampsia in particular, have an increased risk of cardiomyopathy during the peripartum period. Whether hypertensive disorders of pregnancy are also associated with cardiomyopathy later in life is unknown.Objective: To determine whether hypertensive disorders of pregnancy are associated with cardiomyopathy beyond the peripartum period.Design, Setting, and Participants: Nationwide register-based cohort study using Cox regression to compare rates of cardiomyopathy in women with and without a history of hypertensive disorders of pregnancy in a cohort of 1,075,763 women with at least 1 pregnancy ending in live birth or stillbirth in Denmark, 1978-2012, with follow-up through December 31, 2012.Exposures: A hypertensive disorder of pregnancy (severe or moderate preeclampsia or gestational hypertension) registered in the National Patient Register.Main Outcomes and Measures: Cardiomyopathy more than 5 months after delivery (outside the peripartum period) up to 34 years 7 months.Result: The women in the primary cohort had 2,067,633 eligible pregnancies during the study period, 76,108 of which were complicated by a hypertensive disorder of pregnancy. During follow-up, 1577 women (mean age, 48.5 years at cardiomyopathy diagnosis; 2.6% with multiple pregnancies) developed cardiomyopathy. Compared with women with normotensive pregnancies (18,211,603 person-years of follow-up; n = 1408 cardiomyopathy events, 7.7/100,000 person-years [95% CI, 7.3-8.2]), women with a history of hypertensive disorders of pregnancy had significantly increased rates of cardiomyopathy (in 173,062 person-years of follow-up among women with severe preeclampsia, n = 27 cardiomyopathy events; 15.6/100,000 person-years [95% CI, 10.7-22.7]; adjusted hazard ratio [HR], 2.20 [95% CI, 1.50-3.23]; in 697,447 person-years of follow-up among women with moderate preeclampsia, n = 102 cardiomyopathy events; 14.6/100,000 person-years [95% CI, 12.0-17.8]; adjusted HR, 1.89 [95% CI, 1.55-2.23]; in 213,197 person-years of follow-up among women with gestational hypertension, n = 40 cardiomyopathy events; 17.3/100,000 person-years [95% CI, 12.7-23.6]; adjusted HR, 2.06 [95% CI, 1.50-2.82]). These increases persisted more than 5 years after the latest pregnancy. Mediation analyses suggested that only about 50% of the association was an indirect association through postpregnancy chronic hypertension. In this cohort, 11% of all cardiomyopathy events occurred in women with a history of hypertensive disorders of pregnancy.Conclusions and Relevance: Women with a history of hypertensive disorders of pregnancy, compared with women without such a history, had a small but statistically significant increased risk of cardiomyopathy more than 5 months after delivery. Further research is necessary to understand whether there is a causal mechanism behind this association. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article evaluates cancer risk in patients with myotonic muscular dystrophy (MMD) registered in the Swedish Hospital Discharge or Danish national Patient Registry between 1997 and 2008. Analysis showed an increase in cancer rate of 73.4 per 10,000 person-years in MMD patients compared to an expected rate of 36.9 percent per 10,000 person-years. The researchers observed notable excess risks of cancers of the endometrium, brain, ovary, and colon. Possible excess of risk of cancers of the eye, female genital organ, thyroid and pancreas. Male and female patients had similar cancer risks after excluding genital organ tumors. Both the Swedish and the Danish cohorts had similar pattern of cancer excess.

Background: Type 1 diabetes mellitus (T1D) and multiple sclerosis (MS) contribute considerably to the burden of autoimmune diseases in young adults. Although HLA patterns of T1D and MS are considered mutually exclusive, individual and familial co-occurrence of the 2 diseases has been reported. Objective: To assess the co-occurrence of T1D and MS by estimating the risk for MS in patients with T1D and the risk for T1D in first-degree relatives of patients with MS. Design, Setting, and Participants: Two population based disease registers, the Danish Hospital Discharge Register and the Danish Multiple Sclerosis Register were used to identify patients with T1D, defined as patients in whom diabetes was diagnosed before age 20 years (N = 6078), and patients with MS (N = 11862). First degree relatives (N = 14771) of patients with MS were identified from family information in the Danish Civil Registration System. Main Outcome Measure: Patients with T1D and first degree relatives of patients with MS were followed up for occurrence of MS and T1D, respectively, and the relative risks were expressed as standardized incidence ratios, that is, ratios of observed to expected numbers of outcomes based on national age, sex, and period specific MS and T1D incidence rates. Results: Patients with T1D were at more than 3-fold increased riskfor development of MS (relative risk, 3.26; 95% confidence interval, 1.80-5.88; n = 11). First-degree relatives of patients with MS were at 63% increased risk (relative risk, 1.63; 95% confidence interval, 1.26-2.12; n = 56) for development of T1D. However, adjusting for familial relationship to patients with T1D reduced the excess risk to 44% (relative risk, 1.44; 95% confidence interval, 1.11-1.88; n=56). Conclusion: The present nationwide cohort study demonstrates an intraindividual and, to a lesser degree, an intrafamilial co-occurrence of MS and T1D. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]