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Behavioral and Environmental Modification of the Genetic Influence on Body Mass Index: A Twin Study

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Abstract

Body mass index (BMI) has a strong genetic basis, with a heritability around 0.75, but is also influenced by numerous behavioral and environmental factors. Aspects of the built environment (e.g., environmental walkability) are hypothesized to influence obesity by directly affecting BMI, by facilitating or inhibiting behaviors such as physical activity that are related to BMI, or by suppressing genetic tendencies toward higher BMI. The present study investigated relative influences of physical activity and walkability on variance in BMI using 5079 same-sex adult twin pairs (70 % monozygotic, 65 % female). High activity and walkability levels independently suppressed genetic variance in BMI. Estimating their effects simultaneously, however, suggested that the walkability effect was mediated by activity. The suppressive effect of activity on variance in BMI was present even with a tendency for low-BMI individuals to select into environments that require higher activity levels. Overall, our results point to community- or macro-level interventions that facilitate individual-level behaviors as a plausible approach to addressing the obesity epidemic among US adults.

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Notes

  1. Shared environmental factors (e.g., poor diet during childhood) may also be inducing this correlation. We chose to use rGE in our example, however, because in our sample BMI contains no variance attributable to shared environmental influences.

  2. In contrast, it should be noted that no such interaction effect was evident when predicting absolute pair differences in BMI from walkability (p = 0.992) except at higher (>70) levels of walkability (p = 0.087).

  3. Indeed, we observed that walking within the neighborhood did not mediate the interactive effect of walkability on variance in BMI.

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Acknowledgments

This research was supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health (R01 AG042176 and RC2 HL103416). The NIH played no role in the study design; data collection, analysis, or interpretation; manuscript preparation; or the decision to submit it for publication. The authors thank Ally Avery, Scientific Operations Manager, and the entire Registry staff for their diligent work in data collection, and the twins for taking part in the Registry.

Conflict of Interest

Erin E. Horn, Eric Turkheimer, Eric Strachan, Glen E. Duncan declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Human and Animal Rights and Informed Consent

All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, USA

    Erin E. Horn & Eric Turkheimer

  2. Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, University of Washington School of Medicine, Seattle, WA, USA

    Eric Strachan

  3. Department of Epidemiology, Nutritional Sciences Program, University of Washington, Box 353410, Seattle, WA, 98195-4310, USA

    Glen E. Duncan

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  1. Erin E. Horn
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  2. Eric Turkheimer
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  3. Eric Strachan
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  4. Glen E. Duncan
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Correspondence to Erin E. Horn.

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Edited by Hermine Maes.

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Horn, E.E., Turkheimer, E., Strachan, E. et al. Behavioral and Environmental Modification of the Genetic Influence on Body Mass Index: A Twin Study. Behav Genet 45, 409–426 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10519-015-9718-6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10519-015-9718-6

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