The Genetics of Coronary Heart Disease: The Contribution of Twin Studies

Evans, Alun; Baal, G. Caroline M. van; McCarron, Peter; deLange, Marlies; Soerensen, Thorkild I.A.; Geus, Eco J. C. de; Kyvik, Kirsten Ohm; Pedersen, Nancy L.; Spector, Tim D.; Andrew, Toby; Patterson, Christopher; Whitfield, John B.; Zhu, Gu; Martin, Nicholas G.; Kaprio, Jaakko; Boomsma, Dorret I.

doi:10.1375/136905203770326439

Cited by 101 publications

(79 citation statements)

References 53 publications

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“…Because familial resemblance could be explained by sharing the environment in addition to sharing genes, the heritability estimates for BP in the present study were somewhat lower than those reported in the previous twin studies. 5,27 Part of the explanation might be the diversity of genetic backgrounds and/or differences in the environmental effects between populations. The present study was performed in Han Chinese, whereas previous studies were mostly performed in white twins.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…First, our study was based on a large sample of adult male and female twins of Han Chinese ethnicity and is one of the largest twin studies for BP. 5,27 Second, BMI was measured in an objective way rather than self-reported. In our study, BP was measured three times according to standard procedures, and we used the mean values in the analyses to decrease measurement error.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Genetic and environmental influences on blood pressure and body mass index in Han Chinese: a twin study

Snieder

et al. 2010

Hypertens Res

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The familial aggregation of blood pressure (BP) may be partly due to the familial aggregation of obesity, caused by genetic and/or environmental factors that influence both. Gene-obesity interactions are expected to result in different heritability estimates for BP at different obesity levels. However, the latter hypothesis has never been tested. The present study included 1243 monozygotic and 833 dizygotic Han Chinese twins (mean±s.d. age: 37.81±9.82; range: 19.1-81.4) from the Chinese National Twin Registry. Body mass index (BMI) was used as the index of general obesity. The outcome measures were systolic BP (SBP) and diastolic BP (DBP). Quantitative genetic modeling was performed using Mx software. The SBP and DBP heritabilities were 46 and 30%, respectively. The positive correlations of BMI with SBP (r¼0.26) and with DBP (r¼0.27) were largely due to genetic factors (approximately 85%). Genetic factors, which also influence BMI, account for 6 and 7% of the total variance for SBP and DBP, respectively. The gene-obesity interaction analysis showed that both common and unique environmental influences on SBP increased with increasing levels of BMI, resulting in a lower heritability at higher BMI levels, whereas for DBP the heritability remained unchanged at higher BMI levels. Our results suggest that higher BMIs may reduce SBP heritability through a larger impact of environmental effects. These conclusions may be valuable for gene-finding studies. Keywords: blood pressure; heritability; interaction; obesity; twin INTRODUCTION Hypertension affects a large proportion of the adult population, 1 and is caused by complex interactions of environmental and genetic factors that vary across populations. Obesity is a well-established risk factor for hypertension. [2][3][4] Twin studies have shown that underlying continuous traits for both hypertension and obesity are significantly heritable. Heritability estimates for both systolic blood pressure (SBP) and diastolic blood pressure (DBP) are between 40 and 60%, 5 and the heritability for body mass index (BMI) is also substantial. 6-8 These estimates raise the possibility that common genetic susceptibility may account for the association. Several previous twin and family studies have shown that the association between blood pressure (BP) and BMI is partly attributed to a common set of genetic factors, 5,9-11 although another study investigating the differences in monozygotic (MZ) twins showed that even in the absence of genetic influences, obesity may still be significantly associated with BP. 12 Moreover, most of these studies

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Genetic and environmental influences on blood pressure and body mass index in Han Chinese: a twin study

Snieder

et al. 2010

Hypertens Res

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“…They may or may not generalize to other samples, although empirically, a surprising stability of heritability estimates is found across cultures and age groups for many traits. Heritability estimates for resting SBP in the Netherlands, for instance, change only very little from adolescence to late adulthood (Hottenga et al, 2005(Hottenga et al, , 2006 and are remarkable comparable to those in Australia (52%), Denmark (66%), Finland (53%), Sweden (54%), and the UK (53%) (Evans et al, 2003).…”

Section: Structural Equation Modelsmentioning

confidence: 75%

Quantitative Genetics in Behavioral Medicine

Geus¹

2010

Handbook of Behavioral Medicine

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“…The studies of twins ramify into genetic [2], physiological [3], biochemical [1] and sociological aspects. There are two types of twins, dizygotic twins (commonly known as fraternal twins) and monozygotic twins, frequently referred to as identical twins.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Computational Discriminability Analysis on Twin Fingerprints

Liu

Srihari

2009

Computational Forensics

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Abstract. Sharing similar genetic traits makes the investigation of twins an important study in forensics and biometrics. Fingerprints are one of the most commonly found types of forensic evidence. The similarity between twins' prints is critical establish to the reliability of fingerprint identification. We present a quantitative analysis of the discriminability of twin fingerprints on a new data set (227 pairs of identical twins and fraternal twins) using both level 1 and level 2 features. Although the patterns of minutiae among twins are more similar than in the general population, the similarity of fingerprints of twins is significantly different from that between genuine prints of the same finger. Twins fingerprints are discriminable with a 1.5% ∼ 1.7% higher EER than non-twins.

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The Genetics of Coronary Heart Disease: The Contribution of Twin Studies

Cited by 101 publications

References 53 publications

Genetic and environmental influences on blood pressure and body mass index in Han Chinese: a twin study

Genetic and environmental influences on blood pressure and body mass index in Han Chinese: a twin study

Quantitative Genetics in Behavioral Medicine

A Computational Discriminability Analysis on Twin Fingerprints

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