Pulmonary haemosiderosis and gluten

(1) Birth order had no significant influence on the incidence of the disease in boys or girls. Birth order distribution (first born, 42*9%; second, 31-8%, third, 17-9%; fourth, or more 7-4%) did not differ significantly from census data.3 (2) There were significantly more infants with low birth weight (<2500 g) (9-3%) in the group with pyloric stenosis than in the control population (4.9%).4 (3) Short gestation pregnancies (<38 weeks) occurred in 16% of mothers of patients with pyloric stenosis (excluding multiple births); this compares with 9% in the general Western Australian population. (Hitchcock NE. Unpublished data.) (4) Several Aboriginal patients had the disease. To our knowledge, pyloric stenosis has not previously been reported in Australian Aborigines. Unfortunately, the hospital records did not describe how many of these Aboriginal patients were of full descent or were part Aboriginal. (5) A family history of pyloric stenosis was present in 65 patients (11%), just over half being in the father's family, one quarter in the mother's family, and the rest in siblings. There were 13 multiple births involved. In only two instances were both infants affected, and in one set of all male triplets only one infant was affected. Pyloric stenosis has been shown, in other studies, to be significantly more common in children of affected parents, especially if the affected parent is the mother5 6 -perhaps because the gene responsible for the disease in girls has greater penetrance than that responsible for the disease in boys. This was not our experience in Perth.