Department of Physiology, Faculty of Medicine and Nursing, University of the Basque Country, Bilbao, 48080, Spain.
Department of Public Health, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, 00014, Finland.
Sci Rep. 2020 May 14;10(1):7974. doi: 10.1038/s41598-020-64883-8.
Genetic factors explain a major proportion of human height variation, but differences in mean stature have also been found between socio-economic categories suggesting a possible effect of environment. By utilizing a classical twin design which allows decomposing the variation of height into genetic and environmental components, we tested the hypothesis that environmental variation in height is greater in offspring of lower educated parents. Twin data from 29 cohorts including 65,978 complete twin pairs with information on height at ages 1 to 69 years and on parental education were pooled allowing the analyses at different ages and in three geographic-cultural regions (Europe, North America and Australia, and East Asia). Parental education mostly showed a positive association with offspring height, with significant associations in mid-childhood and from adolescence onwards. In variance decomposition modeling, the genetic and environmental variance components of height did not show a consistent relation to parental education. A random-effects meta-regression analysis of the aggregate-level data showed a trend towards greater shared environmental variation of height in low parental education families. In conclusion, in our very large dataset from twin cohorts around the globe, these results provide only weak evidence for the study hypothesis.
遗传因素解释了人类身高变化的主要部分，但在社会经济类别的平均值中也发现了身高的差异，这表明环境可能有一定的影响。通过利用经典的双胞胎设计，我们可以将身高的变化分解为遗传和环境因素，从而检验这样一种假设，即环境对身高的影响在教育程度较低的父母的后代中更大。利用来自 29 个队列的双胞胎数据，其中包括 65978 对完整的双胞胎，他们的身高信息从 1 岁到 69 岁不等，并且还记录了父母的教育程度，我们在不同年龄和三个地理文化区域（欧洲、北美和澳大利亚以及东亚）进行了分析。父母的教育程度与后代的身高大多呈正相关，在儿童中期和青春期以后相关性更为显著。在方差分解模型中，身高的遗传和环境方差成分与父母的教育程度没有一致的关系。对汇总数据的随机效应元回归分析表明，低教育程度家庭的身高共享环境变异较大。总之，在我们来自全球双胞胎队列的大型数据集里，这些结果仅为研究假设提供了微弱的证据。
