Is Hodgkin's disease infectious? Discussion of an epidemiologic method used to impute that it is.

A method proposed by MacMahon for the differentiation between familial and environmental causes for disease has recently been applied to demonstrate an environmental etiology for Hodgkin's disease. It is shown that the method, which depends on the comparison of time-of-onset differences with age-at-onset differences for familial pairs with disease, is biased toward results suggestive of an environmental etiology when applied to data of the kind typically analyzed--data restricted to instances in which both members of a familial pair develop disease in a specified, limited time interval. Other features of such data are discussed.