Abstract
Not a single teratogenic factor has been detected in epidemiologic studies (Miller, 1975), and most associations demonstrated in such investigations have merely been confirmatory. Yet surveillance programs and special epidemiologic studies should be considered essential components of modern health care. They serve several functions: surveillance might detect trends and clusters in the incidence of malformations, which could lead to both preplanned analytical investigations and practical consequences (warnings). Furthermore, as nonepidemiologic, experimental methods suffer from serious drawbacks and limitations and their results cannot easily be extrapolated to human subjects (Fraser, 1964; Saxén and Rapola, 1969; Saxén, 1983), epidemiologic methods should be used in testing the hypotheses based on such experimental results.
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Saxén, L. (1983). Twenty Years of Study of the Etiology of Congenital Malformations in Finland. In: Kalter, H. (eds) Issues and Reviews in Teratology. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-7311-1_4
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