Contacts between young patients with Hodgkin's disease. A case-control study.

To investigate the possibility that Hodgkin's disease (H.D.) may be transmitted from person to person, a case-control study was conducted among 87 of the 97 H.D. patients diagnosed under the age of 40 years in the period 1962-71, resident at the time of diagnosis in a defined area around Oxford. For each of the 87 H.D. patients a matched control patient was selected with a diagnosis other than that of a chronic or malignant disease. H.D. patients and controls were interviewed to determine their places of schooling and work and attempts were made to link pairs of patients who had attended the same school or work place at the same time. The findings do not support the hypothesis that H.D. patients may pass on the disease to others. Among the H.D. patients, links between 40 pairs were established, compared with 40-75 links expected, based upon the experience of all 174 persons studied. The only finding which was statistically significant (p approximately 0-04) arose when H.D. patients were considered to be "susceptible" from 10 to 5 years before diagnosis and "infective" from diagnosis to 2 years after diagnosis: 7 pairs of links were found against 2-75 expected. However, since 7 postulated periods of susceptibility and 9 postulated periods of infectivity were examined, this one "statistically significant" finding might easily have arisen by chance.