title: Heritability of body mass index in pre-adolescence, young adulthood and late adulthood.
abstract: Increased body mass index (BMI) is a worldwide health issue. Individual differences in the susceptibility to increased BMI could be related to genes or environment. We performed a systematic review of genetic studies on BMI in pre-adolescence, young adulthood and late adulthood. We searched PubMed and EMBASE with heritability, body mass index, BMI, weight, height, anthropometry and twins as search terms. Studies reporting intra-pair correlations of healthy twin pairs that were raised together were included. This resulted in the inclusion of 8,179 monozygotic (MZ) and 9,977 dizygotic (DZ) twin pairs from twelve published studies in addition to individual participant data for 629 MZ and 594 DZ pairs from four twin registries. Structural equation modelling with intra-pair twin correlations showed that the heritability of BMI remained high over all age categories ranging from 61% (95% CI 54-64%) to 80% (95% CI 76-81%) for male and female subjects combined, while unique environmental influences increased from 14% (95% CI 13-15%) to 40% (95% CI 37-43%) with increasing age. Heritability of BMI remains consistently high over different age categories. Environmental changes over time do not seem to have as big a relative impact on an individual's weight as previously reported, suggesting a mainly genetic influence on variation in BMI over the years.
authors.affiliation: Unit of Urologic and Genetic Epidemiology, Department of Public Health, Epidemiology and Biostatistics, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, B15 2TT, UK. c.nan@bham.ac.uk
authors.forename: Cassandra
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Nan
authors.forename: Boliang
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Guo
authors.forename: Claire
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Warner
authors.forename: Tom
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Fowler
authors.forename: Timothy
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Barrett
authors.forename: Dorret
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Boomsma
authors.forename: Tracy
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Nelson
authors.forename: Keith
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Whitfield
authors.forename: Gaston
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Beunen
authors.forename: Martine
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Thomis
authors.forename: Hermine Hendrik
authors.initials: HH
authors.lastname: Maes
authors.forename: Catherine
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Derom
authors.forename: Juan
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Ordoñana
authors.forename: Jonathan
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Deeks
authors.forename: Maurice
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Zeegers
mesh_terms: D001823:Body Composition / Q000235:genetics*; D015992:Body Mass Index; D001835:Body Weight / Q000235:genetics*; D002648:Child; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D009765:Obesity / Q000235:genetics; D012042:Registries; D014427:Twins / Q000235:genetics*; D055815:Young Adult