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EPIDEMIOLOGY OF CHILDHOOD LEUKAEMIA IN MIGRANT POPULATIONS
Author(s) -
Innis M. D.
Publication year - 1974
Publication title -
medical journal of australia
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.904
H-Index - 131
eISSN - 1326-5377
pISSN - 0025-729X
DOI - 10.5694/j.1326-5377.1974.tb93663.x
Subject(s) - heredity , abnormality , incidence (geometry) , childhood leukaemia , epidemiology , cancer , demography , medicine , biology , genetics , pediatrics , pathology , psychiatry , physics , sociology , optics
Although the relative frequency of childhood leukaemia varies from place to place, it appears to be constant within a particular ethnic group, no matter how widely dispersed. Examination of the data In “Cancer Incidence in Five Continents” shows that migrant children of essentially British heredity, those of essentially Japanese heredity and those of essentially West African heredity have a relative frequency of leukaemia similar to children in the land of their origin. A reasonable explanation of this observation is that leukaemia and other common malignancies of childhood are hereditary genetic disorders in Hardy‐Weinberg equilibrium. Normal myeloid cells rendered neoplastic in leukaemic recipients probably reflect the basic disturbance in leukaemia, a hereditary genetic abnormality of the regulators of replication and differentiation of this series. This hereditary abnormality is most probably transmitted polygenically.