Congenital anomalies among the offspring of fire fighters

✍ Scribed by Kristan J. Aronson; Linda A. Dodds; Loraine Marrett; Claus Wall

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 1996
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 398 KB
• Volume: 30
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0271-3586
• DOI: 10.1002/(sici)1097-0274(199607)30:1<83::aid-ajim14>3.0.co;2-4

✦ Synopsis

A case-control study has been conducted to determine the association between employment as a firefighter and congenital heart defects among the offspring. Cases were fathers of all children born between 1979 and 1986 in Ontario, Canada, who were diagnosed with a cardiac congenital anomaly during the first year of life (n = 9340). Matched controls (n = 9340), defined as fathers whose child did not have a congenital anomaly, were randomly selected from the Ontario birth certificate file. In order to identi& those fathers who had been employed as a fire fighter, the cases and controls were linked to a cohort of Metropolitan Toronto fire fighters. Eleven cases and nine controls worked as firefighters, giving an odds ratio of 1.22 (9.5 percent confidence interval 0.46-3.33). This study had sufficient power to detect the level of risk reported in one previous study; however, these results do not support a hypothesis of elevated risk of cardiac congenital anomalies among the offspring of fire fighters. @ 1996 why-Liss, Inc.