In hyperendemic villages in the Vratza district of Bulgaria, 193 patients with urinary system tumors (UST) were diagnosed during 1965 to 1976. A tendency towards familial aggregation was revealed when the patients were compared with two groups of controls, namely, patients with tumors other than UST and healthy persons. Each control group consisted of 193 persons matched by sex, age, and place ...

The analysis of family-study data sometimes focuses on whether a dichotomous trait tends to cluster in families. For traits with variable age-at-onset, it may be of interest to investigate whether age-at-onset itself also exhibits familial clustering. A complication in such investigations is that censoring by age-at-ascertainment can induce artifactual familial correlation in the age-at-onset o...

OBJECTIVES In India there has been a decline in overall under-five mortality, with some states still showing very high mortality rates. It is argued that there is family clustering in mortality among children aged <5 years. We explored the effects of programmable (proximate) determinants on under-five mortality by accounting for family-level clustering and adjusting for background variables usi...

Gastric cancer is associated with high morbidity and mortality rates worldwide. Identifying individuals at high risk is important for surveillance and prevention of gastric cancer. Having first-degree relatives diagnosed with gastric cancer is a strong and consistent risk factor for gastric cancer, but the pathogenic mechanisms behind this familial aggregation are unclear. Against this backgrou...

Most inherited cancer syndromes are characterized by the familial clustering of cancers at several organ sites. To determine if cancers, other than pancreatic cancer, cluster in pancreatic cancer kindreds, we examined mortality patterns among the relatives of National Familial Pancreatic Tumor Registry probands. Over 200,000 person-years of follow-up from 8,564 first-degree relatives of proband...

BACKGROUND The last comprehensive epidemiological studies on familial sarcoidosis in the UK were more than 25 years ago, reporting another affected family member in 1.7% of index cases. A significant proportion of like-sex over unlike-sex pairs, an excess of mother-child over father-child associations, and a preponderance of monozygous over dizygous twins was noted. Another study reported ethni...

OBJECTIVES Familial clustering of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is well established, but the familial risk of COPD has not been determined among adoptees. The aim was to determine whether the familial transmission of COPD is related to disease in biological and/or adoptive parents. DESIGN Historic cohort study. PARTICIPANTS 80,214 (50% females). METHODS The Swedish Multi-Ge...

BACKGROUND Sexual crime is an important public health concern. The possible causes of sexual aggression, however, remain uncertain. METHODS We examined familial aggregation and the contribution of genetic and environmental factors to sexual crime by linking longitudinal, nationwide Swedish crime and multigenerational family registers. We included all men convicted of any sexual offence (N = 2...

OBJECTIVES We investigated the prevalence of lamin A/C (LMNA) gene defects in familial and sporadic dilated cardiomyopathies (DCM) associated with atrioventricular block (AVB) or increased serum creatine-phosphokinase (sCPK), and the corresponding changes in myocardial and protein expression. BACKGROUND It has been reported that familial DCM, associated with conduction disturbances or variabl...

Thoracic aortic aneurysm/dissection (TAAD) is a potential lethal condition with a rising incidence. This condition may occur sporadically; nevertheless, it displays familial clustering in >20% of the cases. Family history confers a six- to twentyfold increased risk of TAAD and has to be considered in the identification and evaluation of patients needing an adequate clinical follow-up. Familial ...