Trends in circulatory disease mortality in Western populations--evidence of similarities in the pattern of measles epidemics.
Trends in the death rates from all forms of cardiovascular disease as a group are compared with those for other diseases. A comparison with morbidity trends for notified infectious diseases, mainly in the postwar period suggested the possibility of a temporal association with measles incidence alone. Trends for a minimum of 20 years in the postwar period in Western populations which have records on measles incidence available from the 1950s indicate varying degrees of similarity with changes in cardiovascular mortality among adults. The association seems unlikely to be entirely explicable by effects of climatic variation but may have arisen from a combination of changing conditions. Alternatively, measles and cardiovascular mortality may be linked through damage resulting from viral contamination and immune reactions in the blood.
D002170:Canada; D002318:Cardiovascular Diseases / Q000401:mortality*; D004196:Disease Outbreaks / Q000453:epidemiology*; D005060:Europe; D006801:Humans; D007564:Japan; D008457:Measles / Q000453:epidemiology*; D008875:Middle Aged; D014481:United States