We realised that despite having run our blog for over 5 years, and many of us using twin data, we had not yet written a brief overview of the twin method. Here Prof Thalia Eley provides a summary of the main principles underlying the approach. …
Jehannine Austin, Ph.D., CGC, is a past president of the National Society of Genetic Counselors and is a professor in the Departments of Psychiatry and Medical Genetics at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. In this blog she discusses how people can help protect their mental health when they may…
If you have a family history of a particular mental disorder there is a chance you have some of the genes associated with it. However this doesn’t mean that you will definitely develop that disorder, you just have a genetic predisposition to it. The genetic component to mental disorders is…
Mental health research does not aim to identify a single factor to “blame” for a disorder. Instead, researchers hope to understand the complex interplay of a number of different factors and use this information to generate new approaches to prevention and treatment. “Our mental health is the…
It is often discussed how strange it is that people are so different to their family members. After all, shared genes and a shared home environment should lead to strong family resemblance, right? Not necessarily.
This blog explains our latest publication in which we analysed Twins Early Development Study data on emotional problems across childhood and adolescence. Accurate assessment is difficult but essential if we are to understand the influences on emotional problems. We took advantage of longitudinal data (i.e. taken across time) to define…
Decades of twin studies have yielded evidence of the heritability of many different traits. What we mean by this is the proportion of variation in a trait that can be explained by genetic differences between individuals. Research has moved towards identifying specific genetic variants associated with these traits through Genome-Wide…
This week in our A-Z post for ‘K’, Tom McAdams [EDIT Lab Associate Director] outlines Kinship, a core concept in the field of behavioural genetics.
Heritability is the proportion of variation in a given population that is due to genetic differences. If a trait is highly heritable, it is more likely to be shared between individuals of close genetic relatedness, regardless of whether they share the same environment. This concept can be difficult to wrap…
For the letter G, Thalia [Eley, EDIT Lab director] walks us through gene-environment correlation, a topic we think will become increasingly widely explored as methods for understanding genetic influence improve.
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