ArticleEuropean journal of epidemiology2024
Familial confounding or measurement error? How to interpret findings from sibling and co-twin control studies.
Article in European journal of epidemiology, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 21 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
21 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Evaluation of the evidence on acetaminophen use and neurodevelopmental disorders using the Navigation Guide methodology.Environmental health : a global access science source · 2025Pooled it
- Unraveling the multifaceted relationship between creativity and mental health with longitudinal analyses of genotyped twins.Molecular psychiatry · 2026Article
- Recreational screen use and internalizing problems from preadolescence to young adulthood in a longitudinal twin cohort with co-twin comparison.Nature human behaviour · 2026Article
- All-cause and cause-specific mortality in gambling disorder: Evidence from a nation-wide matched and sibling cohort study in Taiwan.Addiction (Abingdon, England) · 2026Article
- Female-specific hypertension risk factors across the lifecourse: a co-twin control analysis using the California Twin Program.American journal of epidemiology · 2026Article
- No evidence of parental mental health influencing children's academic achievement: a within-family study.European child & adolescent psychiatry · 2026Article
- Long-term impact of stressful life events on breast cancer risk: A 36-year genetically informed prospective study in the Finnish Twin Cohort.International journal of cancer · 2026Article
- Co-twin Control Analyses Reveal Genetic Contributions to SES Influences in Mean Level and Longitudinal Change in Physical Aging.Behavior genetics · 2026Article
- Article
- Null within-twin estimates on education and dementia: cautions for within-family contrasts.European journal of epidemiology · 2025Article
- Maternal body mass index in early pregnancy and autism in offspring: a population-based cohort study in Sweden and Denmark.BMC medicine · 2025Article
- Is educational attainment protective against developing dementia? A twin study of genetic and environmental contributions.European journal of epidemiology · 2025Article
- Associations of smoking status and leisure-time physical activity with waist circumference change-10-year follow-up among twin adults.International journal of obesity (2005) · 2025Article
- Associations of Romantic Partners' Characteristics with Alcohol Consumption and Binge Drinking: Examining Evidence for Gene-Environment Interaction.Clinical psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science · 2025Article
- Recreational Screen Use and Internalizing Problems from Preadolescence to Young Adulthood: A population-based Cohort and Co-Twin Control Study.Research square · 2025Article
- Multi-Omic Associations of Epigenetic Age Acceleration Are Heterogeneously Shaped by Genetic and Environmental Influences.Aging cell · 2025Article
- Sibling Control Analysis of Perinatal Health and Family Environment Factors Related to Childhood ADHD Symptoms.medRxiv : the preprint server for health sciences · 2025Article
- Protein Associations With Alcohol Consumption and Genetic Risk for Alcohol-Related Sociomedical Conditions.Addiction biology · 2025Article
- Etiology and correlates of alcohol misuse in early midlife.Alcohol, clinical & experimental research · 2025Article
- Prenatal maternal stress: triangulating evidence for intrauterine exposure effects on birth and early childhood outcomes across multiple approaches.BMC medicine · 2025Article
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Authors and funding
5 authors.
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Abstract
Epidemiological researchers often examine associations between risk factors and health outcomes in non-experimental designs. Observed associations may be causal or confounded by unmeasured factors. Sibling and co-twin control studies account for familial confounding by comparing exposure levels among siblings (or twins). If the exposure-outcome association is causal, the siblings should also differ regarding the outcome. However, such studies may sometimes introduce more bias than they alleviate. Measurement error in the exposure may bias results and lead to erroneous conclusions that truly causal exposure-outcome associations are confounded by familial factors. The current study used Monte Carlo simulations to examine bias due to measurement error in sibling control models when the observed exposure-outcome association is truly causal. The results showed that decreasing exposure reliability and increasing sibling-correlations in the exposure led to deflated exposure-outcome associations and inflated associations between the family mean of the exposure and the outcome. The risk of falsely concluding that causal associations were confounded was high in many situations. For example, when exposure reliability was 0.7 and the observed sibling-correlation was r = 0.4, about 30-90% of the samples (n = 2,000) provided results supporting a false conclusion of confounding, depending on how p-values were interpreted as evidence for a family effect on the outcome. The current results have practical importance for epidemiological researchers conducting or reviewing sibling and co-twin control studies and may improve our understanding of observed associations between risk factors and health outcomes. We have developed an app (SibSim) providing simulations of many situations not presented in this paper.
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