Asthma, Rhinitis, other Respiratory DiseasesConcordance and interrelationship of atopic diseases and markers of allergic sensitization among adult female twins☆,☆☆
Section snippets
Methods
The St Thomas's UK Adult Twin Registry was used as the source of twins.8 Briefly, this comprises mainly female twins from throughout the United Kingdom who were recruited by means of media campaigns9, 10 without specifying the diseases for study or the hypotheses to be tested. Pairs were invited to attend the Twin Research Unit, St Thomas's Hospital, London, for a full day of clinical tests, including a self-completed questionnaire relating to allergic diseases. The questions on asthma and
Results
Questionnaires were completed by both members of 873 female twin pairs (340 monozygotic and 533 dizygotic pairs), of whom 552 pairs (282 monozygotic and 270 dizygotic) were tested for total and specific IgE. Their ages at examination ranged from 18 to 72 years (mean, 47 years). Some results are presented separately for the pairs aged less than 50 years (140 monozygotic and 325 dizygotic pairs) and those aged greater than 50 years (200 monozygotic and 208 dizygotic pairs).
Discussion
This is the largest twin study yet published that has included objective markers of allergic sensitization. Our sample of twins was recruited mainly by means of advertisement and therefore in theory may be less representative of all twins than series derived from comprehensive national registers. The most likely type of volunteer bias is toward a higher degree of concordance, particularly among monozygotic pairs.19 It is unlikely that this would seriously affect comparisons of affected and
Acknowledgements
We thank the twins who took part in this study and study nurses Karen Smith and Liz Tomlin for administering the questionnaires, cleaning the data, and collecting and processing blood samples. We also thank Rosemary Fulljames for her diligent attention to the laboratory assays and Sarah Moran for assistance with the statistical analyses.
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Supported by the Wellcome Trust (project grant No. 047232/Z/96/Z). At the time of this study the St Thomas's Hospital Twin Research and Genetic Epidemiology Unit received funding from the Chronic Diseases Research Foundation, The British Heart Foundation, the Arthritis and Rheumatism Council, and Gemini Genomics Limited.
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Reprint requests: David Strachan, MD, Department of Public Health Sciences, St George's Hospital Medical School, Cranmer Terrace, London SW17 0RE, United Kingdom.