Suchergebnisse

AbstractObjective:As post-pregnancy weight retention in women is a risk factor for obesity later in life, we assessed the changes in magnitude of genetic and environmental variation in BMI due to parity in an Australian female sample, comprising 11,915 female twins and their sisters.Results:Total variance of BMI increased with parity, primarily driven by an increase in nonadditive genetic variance. This finding was of particular interest given Gutersohn et al's (2000) report of recessive association between post-partum weight retention and the 825T allele of theGNβ3gene (rs5443) at 12p13.31. Hence, we attempted to replicate this association and test an additional three SNPs also located near or onGNβ3(rs10744716 (upstream), rs5442 (exon 10), rs5446 (exon 11)) in a sample of 3131 females and 1693 males from 2585 twin families. No association was found between these SNPs among females, even when allowing for a genotype by parity effect. However, a significant association was observed among males for rs10744716 (χ22= 10.22,p= 0.006; effect size = 0.47kg/m2), representing a novel association between a region upstream ofGNβ3and male BMI.

Physical activity is influenced by genetic factors whose expression may change with age. We employed an extension to the classical twin model that allows a modifier variable, age, to interact with the effects of the latent genetic and environmental factors. The model was applied to self-reported data from twins aged 19 to 50 from seven countries that collaborated in the GenomEUtwin project: Australia, Denmark, Finland, Norway, Netherlands, Sweden and United Kingdom. Results confirmed the importance of genetic influences on physical activity in all countries and showed an age-related decrease in heritability for 4 countries. In the other three countries age did not interact with heritability but those samples were smaller or had a more restricted age range. Effects of shared environment were absent, except in older Swedish participants. The study confirms the importance of taking age effects into account when exploring the genetic and environmental contribution to physical activity. It also suggests that the power of genome-wide association studies to identify the genetic variants contributing to physical activity may be larger in young adult cohorts.