Age Differences in Genetic and Environmental Varia

Authors: YoonMi Hur Alexander J MacGregor Lynn Cherkas Frances M K Williams Tim D Spector

Publish Date: 2012/05/05

Volume: 42, Issue: 4, Pages: 541-548

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Abstract

The way people cope with stressors of day to day living has an important influence on health The aim of the present study was to explore whether genetic and environmental variations in stresscoping differ over time during adulthood The brief COPE was mailed to a large sample of the UK female twins N = 4736 having a wide range of age 20–87 years Factor analyses of the items of the brief COPE yielded three coping scales ‘ProblemSolving’ ‘Support Seeking’ and ‘Avoidance’ Monozygotic and dizygotic twin correlations tended to become lower with age for all three scales suggesting that unique environmental factors may become more important with age during adulthood Modelfitting results showed that relative influences of unique environmental factors increased from 60  at age 20 years to 74 at age 87 years for ‘ProblemSolving’ and 56  at age 20 years to 76 at age 87 years for ‘Avoidance’ During the same age period genetic factors decreased from 40 to 26  for ‘ProblemSolving’ and from 44 to 24  for ‘Avoidance’ For ‘Seeking Support’ the magnitude of genetic and unique environmental factors was not significantly different across the adulthood For all three scales shared environmental effects were negligible Overall our findings implicate that the effects of environment that stem from idiosyncratic experience of stressful life events accumulate and become increasingly important in adulthoodThe first author YM Hur is supported by the Pioneer Fund USA and Korea Research Foundation Grants TwinsUK register is supported by the Wellcome Trust We would like to thank twins who participated in our study and Irina GillhamNasenya for the data management

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