A Twin Study of Pubertal Development among Adolescents in Taiwan
Date Issued
2005
Date
2005
Author(s)
Chen, Kuang-Hung
DOI
en-US
Abstract
Objective: Puberty is a critical developmental period and may play an important role on several psychiatric disorders. Despite that contribution from genes to single measures of puberty was indicated in previous twin studies, prominent differential secular trends in pubertal timing were also noted in different countries. The purpose of this study is to examine the relative contributions of genetic and environmental factors to pubertal development assessed comprehensively among adolescent twins in Taiwan, where a steady decline in pubertal timing has been noted in the past decades.
Methods: Participants were adolescent twins recruited from two sources. One was recruited in Taipei City during 1996-1998, and the other was in Taipei City or Taipei County during 2001-2004. A total of 160 pairs of male twins, 254 pairs of female twins, and 54 opposite-sex pairs were included. A Chinese-version of Puberty Developmental Scale was used to measure various aspects of pubertal development. Zygosity was determined using a combination of physical similarity questionnaire and DNA typing. We used structural equation modeling to estimate parameters of additive genetic (A), shared environmental (C), dominant genetic (D), and non-shared environmental (E) factors in accounting for the variation of both individual pubertal development items and composite pubertal scores in either dichotomized or continuous form of variable.
Results: For each pubertal development item common to both genders, including height growth spurt, body hair, and skin change, the proportion of the variance attributed to additive genetic factors ranged from 0.40 to 0.67 for girls and from 0.39 to 0.58 for boys. Moderate contributions from shared environmental factors were also found to breast development (29%), height growth (11%), body hair (36%), and pubertal stage (28%) in girls and skin change (19%), body hair (21%), and facial hair (12%) in boys. For girls, the majority of the variance for the presence of menarche (88%) was explained by shared environmental factors, while that for age of menarche (73%) was by genetic factors. In terms of pubertal stage, the contribution from genes was estimated to be zero using continuous approach and 63% of the variance using categorical approach for girls; meanwhile, for boys, the corresponding figures were 49% and 75%, respectively.
Conclusions: There is substantial genetic contribution to pubertal development for adolescents in Taiwan despite non-negligible influences from shared environmental factors that might have resulted in a prominent secular decline in pubertal timing.
Subjects
青春期發展
雙胞胎
青少年
初經
pubertal development
twins
adolescent
menarche
Type
thesis
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