Sudden cardiac death (SCD) is the leading cause of death in firefighters. Although on-duty SCD usually occurs in older victims almost exclusively because of coronary heart disease, no studies have examined causation across the career span. In the present retrospective case-control study, cases of SCD in young (aged ≤45 years) firefighters from the National Institute for Occupational Safety and ...

BACKGROUND Sickle cell disease (SCD) is an autosomal recessive genetic disorder, with persons heterozygous for the mutation said to have the sickle cell trait (SCT). Serious adverse effects are mainly limited to those with SCD, but the distinction between disease and trait is not always clear to the general population. We sought to determine the accuracy of self-reported SCD when compared to ge...

BACKGROUND Sudden cardiac death (SCD) is often the first manifestation of coronary heart disease (CHD) among women. Data regarding BMI and risk of SCD are limited and conflicting. OBJECTIVES We examined the association of BMI repeatedly measured over 32 years and BMI during early and mid-adulthood with risk of SCD in the Nurses' Health Study. METHODS We prospectively followed 72,484 women f...

Ulla A. Hvidtfeldt, MSc; Janne S. Tolstrup, MSc, PhD; Marianne U. Jakobsen, MSc, PhD; Berit L. Heitmann, PhD; Morten Grønbæk, MD, PhD; Eilis O’Reilly, ScD; Katarina Bälter, PhD; Uri Goldbourt, PhD; Göran Hallmans, MD, PhD; Paul Knekt, PhD; Simin Liu, MD, ScD; Mark Pereira, PhD; Pirjo Pietinen, ScD; Donna Spiegelman, ScD; June Stevens, MSc, PhD; Jarmo Virtamo, MD; Walter C. Willett, MD, DrPH; Er...

Spleen damage is a common and crucial characteristic of SCD. A damaged spleen cannot effectively clear bacteria from the blood, leaving SCD patients, particularly young children, highly susceptible to infection. Children with SCD have rates of infection caused by bacterial pneumonia 30-100 times that of children without SCD, and pneumonia vaccines are of limited effectiveness in this age group ...

AIMS Mental depression is associated with an increased risk of cardiovascular mortality, but the reasons for this association are not well known. We tested the hypothesis that depressive symptoms (DS) may specifically increase the risk of sudden cardiac death (SCD) among the elderly subjects. METHODS All persons aged 70 years or over of a defined area in Northern Finland (n=1113) were the tar...

BACKGROUND Early detection and interventions have enabled patients with sickle cell disease (SCD) to live well into adulthood. Consequently, the chronicity of SCD allows for the insidious manifestation of multisystem complications, including renal damage. Cystic renal lesions are commonly incidentally discovered on ultrasound and computerised tomography (CT) imaging of the abdomen. Most are ben...

OBJECTIVE Children with sickle cell disease (SCD) exhibit poor somatic growth due to nutritional and metabolic effects, but potential relationships between growth and other areas of development are unclear. We examined whether growth is related to cognition and whether growth might be one marker of neurocognitive risk. METHODS Sixty-four children with SCD and eighty-one demographically simila...

Painful vaso-occlusive crises (VOCs) are the hallmark of sickle cell disease (SCD); however, many patients experience frequent daily pain that does not follow the pattern of typical VOCs. This pain of variable severity, also referred as persistent pain in the SCD literature, contributes to significant morbidity and poor quality of life and often fails to respond adequately to standard SCD thera...