Body-Mass Indexes of British Separated Twins

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Abstract
We describe familial influences on the body-mass index (weight in kilograms divided by the square of the height in meters) of pairs of monozygotic twins who were separated early in life (47 percent at birth and 63 percent at six months) and reared apart. They were recruited primarily through a television broadcast, and thus provide a volunteer sample that complements and contrasts with the population-registry—based sample described in a report in this week's issue of the Journal.1 All but one of the subjects had known about their twins before the study. Shields reported the intraclass correlation coefficients for the height and weight of the monozygotic twins who were raised apart: the coefficient was 0.82 for the height of both the men and women, 0.87 for the weight of the men, and 0.37 for the weight of the women.2 He did not, however, report weights standardized for height. The data in the original files for 38 of his total of 44 twin pairs permitted us to determine these values, and we report here (with the permission of the custodians of the data, Professors G.F.M. Russell and R.M. Murray) an analysis of the within-pair correlation of the body-mass indexes of the monozygotic twins reared apart and the control twins reared together, who were identified through the same televised appeal. We excluded six pairs from the original series of monozygotic twins reared apart, for various reasons: age under 16 years (two pairs), missing data (two pairs), unreliable measurement (one pair), and pregnancy (one pair). Seven pairs of dizygotic twins from Shields' study who had been reared apart2 were included for comparison ( Table 1 ).

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