Thompson Owen
University of Wisconsin Milwaukee, Milwaukee, WI, USA.
Health Econ. 2017 Nov;26(11):1337-1352. doi: 10.1002/hec.3401. Epub 2016 Sep 15.
Researchers have found strong linkages between parent and child health, but the mechanisms underlying intergenerational health transmission are not well understood. This paper investigates how the importance of genetic health transmission mechanisms varies by environmental conditions in the case of pediatric asthma, the single most common chronic health condition among American children. Using a sample that includes approximately 2000 adoptees and a large number of similar biological families, I find that the relative importance of genetic transmission differs strongly by socioeconomic status (SES). In high SES families, parent-child asthma associations are approximately 75% weaker among adoptees than biological children, suggesting a dominant role for genetic transmission. In lower SES families, parent-child asthma associations are virtually identical across biological and adoptive children, suggesting a negligible role for genetic transmission. A potential interpretation of this difference is that as environmental conditions affecting asthma improve among higher SES children, an increasingly large share of asthma variation is due to genetics. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
研究人员已经发现了父母与子女健康之间的紧密联系，但代际健康传递背后的机制尚未得到充分理解。本文以小儿哮喘为例，研究了遗传健康传递机制的重要性如何因环境条件而异，小儿哮喘是美国儿童中最常见的单一慢性健康状况。通过使用一个包含约2000名被收养者以及大量类似亲生家庭的样本，我发现遗传传递的相对重要性因社会经济地位（SES）而有很大差异。在高社会经济地位家庭中，被收养儿童的亲子哮喘关联比亲生子女弱约75%，这表明遗传传递起主导作用。在低社会经济地位家庭中，亲生子女和收养子女之间的亲子哮喘关联几乎相同，这表明遗传传递的作用微不足道。对此差异的一种可能解释是，随着影响哮喘的环境条件在高社会经济地位儿童中得到改善，越来越大比例的哮喘变异是由基因导致的。版权所有© 2016约翰·威利父子有限公司。
