The constancy of parent-offspring similarity of total cholesterol throughout childhood and early adult life. The Lipid Research Clinics Program Prevalence Study.

In a cross-sectional study of 11,409 white parent-offspring pairs in five North American populations we examined the effect of age of the offspring on parent-offspring total cholesterol correlations. In general there were no differences in correlations by age of the offspring for the four types (by gender) of parent-offspring pairs. This was true within each of the five populations and for the average of all populations combined. For offspring from less than 2-29 years of age, these average age-specific correlations ranged from 0.17 to 0.42. Despite the considerable physiologic and environmental changes which influence cholesterol levels from birth to early adulthood, the strength of parent-offspring similarity shows no consistent pattern of change.