Clustering of diseases in families
Based on years of detailed registration of the entire Danish population a database has been set up at Statens Serum Institut (SSI) that shows all registered family relations in Denmark. By linking the information in the Family Relations Database to diagnoses in the National Patient Registry we are able to study how diseases cluster in families.
Nature or nurture?
At SSIs Department of Epidemiology Research we have studied through the Family Relations Database the clustering of congenital disease, childhood diseases, infectious disease, chronic disease, sudden death and preterm birth. We study how diseases run in families - among twins, siblings and half siblings and cousins/half cousins. We also look at the differences in sex, age at diagnose and time span between diagnoses in the families.
Finally we have studied whether two specific diseases tend to occur in the same families. Taken together this information will indicate whether the familial clustering is primarily due to environmental or genetic factors.
Familial clustering in Greenland
The Family Relations Database is also used for studying clustering in Greenland. For this arctic environment we focus our studies on the susceptibility to Epstein-Barr infection and nasopharyngal carcinoma.
Disease Risk
A part from the study of familial clustering the familial relations database has also been used for studies on how the risk of disease is affected by the number of children a woman has given birth to or the number of siblings a person has. Our studies have shown that women who gave birth to their first child relatively late have a higher risk of malignant melanoma. As the same result was seen for men the risk is likely to be explained by behavioural or environmental factors rather than e.g. hormonal changes during pregnancy.
Last revised 21 December 2011