Modifiable environmental influences on body mass index shared by young adult brothers.

OBJECTIVES

Twin and adoption studies suggest that family environment has little, if any, influence on body mass index (BMI) in adulthood. We investigated the hypothesis that the differences in the years of birth between siblings influence their similarity in BMI at comparable ages, which would give evidence for a possibly modifiable influence of the environment shared by family members.

METHODS

Swedish full-brother pairs (N=261 712) born between 1951 and 1983 were measured for BMI in conscription examination at 16-26 years (median: 18.2 years) of age and were divided into quartiles by the difference between their birth-years (< 2.25 years, 2.25-3.33 years, 3.34-5.08 years and >5.08 years). Furthermore, 1961 dizygotic twin brother pairs from the same population representing brothers born at the same time were included. In addition, the log BMI of the younger brother was modeled as a linear function of the log BMI of the older brother. Subsequently, the significance of the interaction between birth-year difference and the BMI of the older brother was tested.

RESULTS

Intraclass correlation for BMI in dizygotic twin pairs was higher (0.431, 95% confidence interval (CI) 0.394-0.466) than the correlation for full-brothers in the first quartile of birth-year difference (0.376, CI 0.342-0.408). Among full-brothers, the BMI correlation decreased from 0.376 (CI 0.342-0.408) [corrected] in the first quartile to 0.338 (CI 0.331-0.345) in the last quartile. The regression analysis showed a statistically significant decrease in correlation with increasing birth-year difference (P<0.001).

CONCLUSION

The influence on BMI in young men of the environment shared by dizygotic twin brothers is greater than between non-twin full-brothers, indicating important influences of concomitant exposure to the same early life environment before and/or after birth. Among non-twin siblings there is a slight possibly modifiable influence as evidenced by declining correlations by increasing distance in years of birth.