Dinescu D

Differential models of twin correlations in skew for body-mass index (BMI)

Tsang S, Duncan GE, Dinescu D, Turkheimer E. Background Body Mass Index (BMI), like most human phenotypes, is substantially heritable. However, BMI is not normally distributed; the skew appears to be structural, and increases as a function of age. Moreover, twin correlations for BMI commonly violate the assumptions of the most common variety of the […]

A Twin Study on Perceived Stress, Depressive Symptoms, and Marriage

Beam CR, Dinescu D, Emery R, Turkheimer E. Marriage is associated with reductions in both perceived stress and depressive symptoms, two constructs found to be influenced by common genetic effects. A study of sibling twins was used to test whether marriage decreases the proportion of variance in depressive symptoms accounted for by genetic and environmental […]

Is Marriage a Buzzkill? A Twin Study of Marital Status and Alcohol Consumption

Dinescu D, Turkheimer E, Beam CR, Horn EE, Duncan G, Emery RE. Married adults have consistently been found to drink less than their single or divorced counterparts. This correlation may not be causal, however, as people nonrandomly “select” into marriage and into alcohol use. The current study uses a sample of 2,425 same-sex twin pairs […]

Socioeconomic modifiers of genetic and environmental influences on body mass index in adult twins

Dinescu D, Horn EE, Duncan G, Turkheimer E Objective Individual measures of socioeconomic status (SES) suppress genetic variance in body mass index (BMI). Our objective was to examine the influence of both individual-level (i.e., educational attainment, household income) and macrolevel (i.e., neighborhood socioeconomic advantage) SES indicators on genetic contributions to BMI. Method The study used […]