Widespread pain among 11-year-old Finnish twin pairs
✍ Scribed by Marja Mikkelsson; Jaakko Kaprio; Jouko J. Salminen; Lea Pulkkinen; Richard J. Rose
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 2001
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 71 KB
- Volume
- 44
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0004-3591
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
Objective:
To examine the prevalence of widespread musculoskeletal pain (wsp) symptoms in 11-year-old finnish twins and to determine the relative role of genetic and environmental factors in the etiology of wsp.
Methods:
Data on current pain items were collected from 1995 to 1998 from a national sample of finnish families with 11-year-old twins born between 1984 and 1987. the presence of wsp was determined using a validated questionnaire method. pairwise similarity was computed for 583 monozygotic (mz) pairs, 588 same-sex dizygotic (dz) pairs, and 618 opposite-sex dz twin pairs. variance components for genetic and environmental factors were estimated using biometric structural equation modeling techniques.
Results:
The prevalence of wsp was 9.9%, with no sex difference. the majority of twin pairs with wsp were discordant. the tetrachoric correlations for male mz (r = 0.38), male dz (r = 0.37), female mz (r = 0.59), female dz (r = 0.54), and opposite-sex pairs (r = 0.43) showed little difference by zygosity. female pairs were more concordant than male pairs among both mz and dz twins. biometric model-fitting indicated that genetic factors did not account for the pattern of twin similarity. among boys 35%, and among girls 56%, of the variation in liability to wsp could be attributed to shared familial environmental effects. the remainder was attributed to unshared environmental effects.
Conclusion:
Genetic factors seem to play at most a minor role in wsp in 11-year-old twins, and environmental factors shared by family members account for a substantial proportion of the variability in wsp.