Barros Pedro, de Sá Joaquim Marques, Sá Maria José
Department of Neurology, Centro Hospitalar São João, 4200-319 Porto, Portugal.
Clin Neurol Neurosurg. 2013 Sep;115(9):1762-5. doi: 10.1016/j.clineuro.2013.04.007. Epub 2013 May 1.
Several studies analyzing the month of birth (MOB) of multiple sclerosis (MS) patients and the risk of the disease have been published; as a whole, MS patients were found to be predominantly born in spring months, leading to the current assumption that MOB is somewhat related to the risk of MS.
Estimate the risk of MS by MOB in a Portuguese population.
MS patients sample was obtained from the database of patients attended at our MS clinic and born in the districts of Porto, Braga and Viana do Castelo. The control sample was composed of the live births records in the same time period and geographical area. We applied the Hewitt test for seasonality.
We found 421 patients that satisfied the conditions to enter the study. The rank-sums for successive 6-month segments indicate the July-December period as of higher incidence; however, the corresponding rank-sum (48) was not statistically significant according to the Hewitt test (p>0.05).
Our data does not support the seasonality hypothesis of MOB as risk factor for MS in Portugal. However we are aware that the analysis of a larger MS sample could shed more light in this issue.
已有多项研究分析了多发性硬化症（MS）患者的出生月份（MOB）与该病风险之间的关系；总体而言，发现MS患者大多出生在春季，由此产生了目前的一种假设，即MOB与MS风险存在某种关联。
评估葡萄牙人群中按出生月份划分的MS风险。
MS患者样本取自我们MS诊所接诊的、出生在波尔图、布拉加和维亚纳堡地区的患者数据库。对照样本由同一时期和地理区域的活产记录组成。我们应用了休伊特季节性检验。
我们找到了421名符合进入研究条件的患者。连续6个月时间段的秩和表明7月至12月期间发病率较高；然而，根据休伊特检验，相应的秩和（48）无统计学意义（p>0.05）。
我们的数据不支持MOB季节性假说作为葡萄牙MS风险因素的观点。然而，我们意识到，对更大的MS样本进行分析可能会使这个问题更加明了。
