伴侣选择、混杂因素和特征趋同都会导致表型伴侣相似性。
Partner choice, confounding and trait convergence all contribute to phenotypic partner similarity.
机构信息
University Center for Primary Care and Public Health, Lausanne, Switzerland.
Department of Computational Biology, University of Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland.
出版信息
Nat Hum Behav. 2023 May;7(5):776-789. doi: 10.1038/s41562-022-01500-w. Epub 2023 Mar 16.
Partners are often similar in terms of their physical and behavioural traits, such as their education, political affiliation and height. However, it is currently unclear what exactly causes this similarity-partner choice, partner influence increasing similarity over time or confounding factors such as shared environment or indirect assortment. Here, we applied Mendelian randomization to the data of 51,664 couples in the UK Biobank and investigated partner similarity in 118 traits. We found evidence of partner choice for 64 traits, 40 of which had larger phenotypic correlation than causal effect. This suggests that confounders contribute to trait similarity, among which household income, overall health rating and education accounted for 29.8, 14.1 and 11.6% of correlations between partners, respectively. Finally, mediation analysis revealed that most causal associations between different traits in the two partners are indirect. In summary, our results show the mechanisms through which indirect assortment increases the observed partner similarity.
伴侣在身体和行为特征方面往往相似，例如教育程度、政治派别和身高。然而，目前尚不清楚是什么导致了这种相似性——是伴侣选择、伴侣影响随着时间的推移增加了相似性，还是共享环境或间接聚类等混杂因素。在这里，我们将孟德尔随机化方法应用于英国生物库中的 51664 对夫妇的数据中，并调查了 118 个特征中的伴侣相似性。我们发现有 64 个特征存在伴侣选择的证据，其中 40 个特征的表型相关性大于因果效应。这表明混杂因素导致了特征相似性，其中家庭收入、整体健康评分和教育分别占伴侣之间相关性的 29.8%、14.1%和 11.6%。最后，中介分析表明，两个伴侣之间不同特征之间的大多数因果关系都是间接的。总之，我们的研究结果表明了间接聚类如何通过机制增加观察到的伴侣相似性。
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