Estimating heritability of height without zygosity information for twins under five years in low- and middle-income countries: An application of normal finite mixture distribution models.

Omar Karlsson, Benjamin W Domingue, Rockli Kim, S V Subramanian

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Article in SSM - population health, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 1 paper.

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1citing papers in PubMed

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1 citing paper in PubMed.

Genetic and Environmental Contributions to Child Height in Low- and Middle-Income Countries.American journal of human biology : the official journal of the Human Biology Council · 2025
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4 authors.

Omar KarlssonTakemi Program in International Health, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Harvard University, 677 Huntington Avenue, Boston, MA, 02115, United States.

Benjamin W DomingueGraduate School of Education, Stanford University, 520 Galvez Mall, Stanford, CA, 94305, USA.

Rockli KimDivision of Health Policy & Management, College of Health Science, Korea University, 145 Anam-ro, Seongbuk-gu, Seoul, 02841, South Korea.

S V SubramanianHarvard Center for Population and Development Studies, 9 Bow Street, Cambridge, MA, 02138, United States.

Funding

No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.

6 · The paper itself

Abstract

Twin studies are widely used to estimate heritability of traits and typically rely on knowing the zygosity of twin pairs in order to determine variation attributable to genetics. Most twin studies are conducted in high resource settings. Large scale household survey data, such as the Demographic and Health Surveys, collect various biomarkers for children under five years old in low- and middle-income countries. These data include twins but no information on zygosity. We applied mixture models to obtain heritability estimates without knowing zygosity of twins, using 249 Demographic and Health Surveys from 79 low- and middle-income countries (14,524 twin pairs). We focused on height of children, adjusted for age and sex, but also provided estimates for other biomarkers available in the data. We estimated that the heritability of height in our sample was 46%.

Indexed as

HeightHeritabilityLow- and middle-income countriesTwin studiesUnknown zygosity

Identifiers

PMID35242993

DOI10.1016/j.ssmph.2022.101043

PMCPMC8861393

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LicenceCC BY-NC-ND

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