The effect of alcohol consumption on periodontitis in older Danes.

OBJECTIVES: To examine the association of alcohol consumption measured at different points in time and periodontitis at 20 years follow-up and to investigate whether long-term alcohol consumption is related to periodontitis in old age. DESIGN: Participants aged 65 years or older in 2003, from the longitudinal study Copenhagen City Heart Study (CCHS), were invited to participate in the Copenhagen Oral Health Senior Study. METHODS: Clinical periodontal attachment loss was calculated to determine the progress of periodontitis. Alcohol consumption was measured at CCHS follow-ups in 1981-1983, 1991-1994 and 2001-2003, using a standard questionnaire. Alcohol consumption was defined as light, moderate and heavy drinking and used individually for each follow-up. The three follow-ups were summarized into long-term alcohol consumption. Logistic regression analysis was used to estimate the relation between alcohol consumption measured at different points in time and periodontitis and to assess the effect of long-term alcohol consumption on periodontitis. RESULTS: The results show that heavy drinkers in 1981-1983 had a higher odds ratio for having periodontitis compared to light drinkers (OR = 4.64 95% CI = [1.1; 19.42]). CONCLUSION: Early consumption of alcohol may increase the odds of having periodontitis 20 years later. There is a need for further studies including larger populations to investigate both alcohol consumption measured at different points in time, and long-term alcohol consumption and periodontitis progression over time.

Linking definition of childhood and adolescent obesity to current health outcomes.

OBJECTIVE: To evaluate the ability of body mass index (BMI) and fat location indices to predict clustering of risk factors for cardiovascular and metabolic disorders in children and adolescents. METHODS: A total of 2 835 children in the 3(rd) (8.2-11.3 years) and 9(th) (14-17.3 years) grade were randomly selected from Denmark, Estonia and Portugal. BMI, waist-circumference (WC) and waist-to-height ratio (WHt) were evaluated. Children were considered to have clustering of risk factors if >or=3 risk factors were present: high levels of total cholesterol, triglyceride, glucose, insulin, blood pressure and low levels of aerobic fitness and HDL-C. The diagnostic accuracy for detecting children at risk was evaluated through receiver operating characteristics analyses, performed separately for boys and girls in the four age groups: 8.2-9.5; 9.5-11.3; 14.0-15.5 and 15.5-17.3 years. Cut-offs producing equal sensitivity and specificity and minimizing misclassifications were derived. Children were classified as overweight and obese based on BMI cut-offs producing equal sensitivity and specificity and minimizing misclassifications, respectively. RESULTS: The diagnostic accuracy for identifying children at risk, measured by the area under the curve (AUC), of all anthropometric indices were significantly higher than what would be expected by chance (AUC >0.5). BMI cut-offs for overweight had similar sensitivity (58.8% to 75%) and specificity (60% to 71.2%) values, whereas specificity (94.4% to 99.7%) was markedly higher than sensitivity (9.3% to 52.6%) for obesity cut-offs. CONCLUSION: BMI, WC and WHt can be used to identify children and adolescents aged 8.2-17.3 years with a clustering of cardiovascular risk factors.

Accuracy and correlates of maternal recall of birthweight and gestational age.

OBJECTIVE: To determine the accuracy of maternal recall of children birthweight (BW) and gestational age (GA), using the Danish Medical Birth Register (DBR) as reference and to examine the reliability of recalled BW and its potential correlates. DESIGN: Comparison of data from the DBR and the European Youth Heart Study (EYHS). SETTING: Schools in Odense, Denmark. POPULATION: A total of 1271 and 678 mothers of school children participated with information in the accuracy studies of BW and GA, respectively. The reliability sample of BW was composed of 359 women. METHOD: The agreement between the two sources was evaluated by mean differences (MD), intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC) and Bland-Altman's plots. The misclassification of the various BW and GA categories were also estimated. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: Differences between recalled and registered BW and GA. RESULTS: There was high agreement between recalled and registered BW (MD =-0.2 g; ICC = 0.94) and GA (MD = 0.3 weeks; ICC = 0.76). Only 1.6% of BW would have been misclassified into low, normal or high BW and 16.5% of GA would have been misclassified into preterm, term or post-term based on maternal recall. The logistic regression revealed that the most important variables in the discordance between recalled and registered BW were ethnicity and parity. Maternal recall of BW was highly reliable (MD =-5.5 g; ICC = 0.93), and reliability remained high across subgroups. CONCLUSION: Maternal recall of BW and GA seems to be sufficiently accurate for clinical and epidemiological use.