ArticleEconomics and human biology2018
Does education attenuate the genetic risk of obesity? Evidence from U.K. Twins.
Article in Economics and human biology, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 7 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
7 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Socioeconomic position, genetic susceptibility, and epigenetic profiles in obesity across the life course: a systematic review.International journal of obesity (2005) · 2026Pooled it
- Intelligence and Dietary Habits: An International Study of Mensa Members.Journal of Intelligence · 2025Article
- Article
- Risk factors affecting polygenic score performance across diverse cohorts.medRxiv : the preprint server for health sciences · 2024Article
- Education counteracts the genetic risk of Alzheimer's disease without an interaction effect.Frontiers in public health · 2023Article
- Genetic propensity for obesity, socioeconomic position, and trajectories of body mass index in older adults.Scientific reports · 2021Article
- Perinatal Outcomes in a Population of Diabetic and Obese Pregnant Women-The Results of the Polish National Survey.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2021Article
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
Abstract
More education is associated with a lower body mass index (BMI) and likelihood of being obese. Obesity and BMI also have a strong genetic basis. Given these observations, we investigate whether more education can reduce obesity by attenuating the underlying genetic risk of being obese, through gene-environment (GxE) interactions. We estimate associations between (i) education, (ii) a genetic risk score (GRS) and (iii) GxE interactions between education and the GRS through Ordinary least Squares (OLS) and twins fixed-effect regressions using data on female twins from the TwinsUK database. OLS estimates show that there are significant associations of education and genetics. Female twins with a university education are 14.3 percentage points less likely to be obese compared to twins with less than compulsory education, and a 1 standard deviation increase in the GRS increases the likelihood of being obese by 5.2 percentage points. The GxE interactions are statistically insignificant, suggesting that the marginal association of the GRS with obesity does not differ by educational attainment. When controlling for confounding through twins fixed-effects, we find a smaller role of genetics. The association of the GRS with obesity decreases to 0.040. Associations of educational attainment are substantially reduced and insignificant. GxE interactions also remain insignificant. Overall, we find little evidence of any GxE interactions.
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