Twenty Years of Study of the Etiology of Congenital Malformations in Finland

摘要: Not a single teratogenic factor has been detected in epidemiologic studies (Miller, 1975), and most associations demonstrated such investigations have merely confirmatory. Yet surveillance programs special should be considered essential components of modern health care. They serve several functions: might detect trends clusters the incidence malformations, which could lead to both preplanned analytical practical consequences (warnings). Furthermore, as nonepidemiologic, experimental methods suffer from serious drawbacks limitations their results cannot easily extrapolated human subjects (Fraser, 1964; Saxen Rapola, 1969; Saxen, 1983), used testing hypotheses based on results.