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Background: Neonatal physical characteristics, including head circumference and birth weight, have been hypothesized to be markers of in utero thymic development. Greater head circumference and lower birth weight have been linked in previous studies to subsequent development of asthma, and greater birth weight has been associated with subsequent development of eczema., Objective: To investigate potential associations between neonatal head circumference and weight and hayfever, asthma and eczema in a cohort of adolescents from Sheffield, England., Methods: Responses to a questionnaire inquiring about physician-diagnosed hayfever, asthma and eczema among adolescents in Sheffield, England, were linked to previously recorded measurements of weight at birth and at 1 month and head circumference at 1 month. Logistic regression methods were used to relate diagnoses to neonatal measurements and potential confounders., Results: The cohort consisted of 10,809 adolescents, of whom 16.5% reported hayfever, 18.0% asthma, and 16.2% eczema. After adjusting for sex, age at the time of the questionnaire, maternal age and gestational age at birth, number of older and younger siblings, time since birth of next older sibling, neonatal sickness, type of neonatal feeding, and maternal and paternal educational backgrounds, hayfever was the only disease associated with neonatal measurements. Comparing the highest with the lowest fifths of distributions, lifetime prevalence of hayfever was positively associated with neonatal head circumference (adjusted odds ratio 1.23, 95% CI 1.03 to 1.47) and with birth weight (1.17, 0.99 to 1.39). Hayfever was inversely related to the ratio of head circumference to birth weight (0.89, 0.75 to 1.05) and to gestational age. The associations with head circumference and birth weight were not substantially altered by further adjustment for gestational age., Conclusion: Greater neonatal head circumference may be associated with an increased risk of hayfever, but the inverse relationship between hayfever prevalence and the ratio of head circumference to birth weight challenges the prior hypothesis that greater head circumference relative to body mass reflects abnormal thymic development in utero, increasing the likelihood of allergic sensitization.

In the British Regional Heart Study, 7735 men aged 40-59 years were asked at initial screening whether their father or mother was alive or dead and to what cause any death had been attributed. They were followed up for the occurrence of major ischaemic heart disease events. At screening the men reported that 23% of the fathers and 43% of the mothers were alive and that 19% of the fathers and 11% of the mothers had died of heart trouble. In a sample of parental deaths, the death certificate was obtained and it was found that a son's report of a parental death from 'heart trouble' was a reliable indication that death had been certified to ischaemic heart disease. However, about half of the parental deaths certified as ischaemic heart disease were not reported as 'heart trouble' by their sons. A major ischaemic heart disease event was experienced by 336 men over an average follow-up of 6.2 years. Men who said their father had died from 'heart trouble' were at twice the risk of a major ischaemic heart disease event compared with men whose fathers were still alive and 1.5 times the risk of men who reported their father to be dead from another or unknown cause, even after accounting for age, systolic blood pressure, serum total cholesterol, cigarette smoking and serum HDL-cholesterol. For men with mother dead from heart trouble, the corresponding figures were 1.3 and 1.0.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)

In a clinical survey of 7735 middle-aged men, alcohol consumption has been related to 25 biochemical and haematological measurements obtained from a single blood sample. Most measurements showed some association with alcohol consumption, gamma-glutamyl transferase (GGT) being the most strongly associated. Lead, mean corpuscular haemoglobin (MCH), mean corpuscular volume, high-density lipoprotein-cholesterol (HDL-C), urate and aspartate transaminase also showed substantial associations with alcohol intake. Using a discriminant analysis technique, a simple score based on five variables (GGT, HDL-C, urate, MCH and lead) provided the best discrimination between heavy drinkers (e.g. more than three pints of beer daily) and occasional drinkers, but still failed to identify more than half of the heavy drinkers. This combined score may prove a useful measure of an individual's biochemical/haematological response to alcohol consumption for use in epidemiological and clinical studies of alcohol related disorders. The use of such indices should complement but not replace measures of alcohol intake derived from questionnaires.

The certified sickness absence of 4482 employees in one plant of a large manufacturing company in South-east England was studied for 12 months. The absences in the principal ethnic groups, Caucasian, Asian, and West Indian were compared. After standardisation for age and job grade in each department the Asians had twice the spells per man and nearly twice the days lost per man compared with the Caucasians. Compared with the Caucasians there was slightly more absence in West Indians. Various factors affect absence, and one reason for these differences may be that the three ethnic groups appreciate painful or unpleasant stimuli to a different degree.

In order to provide clues to the aetiology of a disease, mortality indices for different areas are often related to explanatory variables by using multiple regression. However, mortality in nearby areas may be similar for reasons not attributable to the covariates, so the errors will not be independent. This paper suggests a way of finding a parameterized form for the correlated error structure by examining the residuals from an ordinary least squares regression. Such a model is then fitted by using maximum likelihood. An example based on cardiovascular mortality in British towns is used to illustrate the problem and our solution.

Blood cadmium concentrations were determined for 6919 men aged 40-59 randomly selected from general practice registers in 24 British towns. The mean and median blood cadmium were 1.9 and 1.4 micrograms/1 respectively and the distribution was highly skewed. The mean levels in non-smokers was 1.0 micrograms/l and current smokers showed a marked gradient with the daily amount smoked, with a mean of 3.9 micrograms/l in men smoking 40 or more cigarettes per day. Whereas 95% of men who never smoked had blood cadmium less than 2.0 micrograms/l, 80% of men smoking 20 or more cigarettes a day exceeded this figure. 1% of the men had blood cadmium concentrations greater than or equal to 7 micrograms/l virtually all of whom currently smoked cigarettes. Blood cadmium levels in ex-smokers were much lower than in current smokers even for those who had stopped within the past year. However, the mean levels in ex-smokers remained higher than the 'never smoked' for several years after stopping. There was little evidence that age, social class, or alcohol consumption were associated with blood cadmium levels after allowance for cigarette smoking. There is substantial geographic variation in mean blood cadmium for middle-aged men which could not be completely accounted for by smoking differences. Towns in the south and east of England all had mean levels under 2.0 micrograms/l whereas the majority of towns in other parts of Britain had mean levels greater than 2.0 micrograms/l. Possible reasons for this geographic pattern (e.g. geochemistry, industrial exposure, dietary differences) need further exploration.