BACKGROUND The human endogenous retroviral family W, Env(C7), member 1 gene (HERVWE1) is thought to participate in trophoblast cell fusion, and its expression is diminished in the placentas of singleton intrauterine growth-retarded pregnancies. However, there is limited information about the role of HERVWE1 in discordant fetal growth in twins. This study was to compare HERVWE1 gene expression b...

Background Use or abuse of opioids and related drugs during pregnancy increases the risk of maternal and neonatal morbidities, including increased susceptibility to Neonatal Abstinence Syndrome (NAS). Severity of NAS is determined by both environmental and genetic factors, but the level of influence each one of them has in determining the severity of NAS is not fully understood. Since the incid...

The theory-of-mind abilities of twins, children with nontwin siblings, and only children were compared to investigate further the link between number and type of siblings and theory-of-mind abilities. Three- to 5-year-old children with nontwin siblings outperformed both only children and twins with no other siblings, twins who also had other siblings outperformed twins who did not, and children...

Research on twins has tended to focus around the question of heredity/environment. As part of this, attention has been paid to how twins' family environments impact upon them. By examining twinship as a social identity, this article considers the social experience of twinship as it is framed by parent-child relations and also actively shaped by twins themselves. Sameness constitutes one central...

Face recognition is one of the most challenging problems in the domain of image processing and machine vision. Face recognition system is critical when individuals have very similar biometric signature such as identical twins. In this paper, new efficient facial-based identical twins recognition is proposed according to the geometric moment. The utilized geometric moment is Pseudo-Zernike Momen...

12 cases of conjoined twins from West Africa were reported between 1936 and 1978. Eight sets were liveborn and were surgically separated either in local hospitals or abroad. Four were stillborn. Two new cases of stillborn conjoined twins were recently delivered at this hospital. The most common type and the ones most likely to be born alive were the omphalopagi. Surgical separation was successf...

This study explored the genetic and prenatal environmental influences on the development of reaching in twins. Detailed kinematic measures of arm movements and underlying muscle co-activation from two sets of monozygotic twins (MZ; one set was monochorionic; the other was dichorionic) and one set of dizygotic (DZ) were measured weekly from reach onset to 30 weeks, then bi-weekly to 1 year of ag...

OBJECTIVE We investigated gene-environment interactions (GxE) for associations between parental divorce and disordered eating (DE). METHOD Participants were 1,810 female twins from the Michigan State University Twin Registry and the Minnesota Twin Family Study. The Minnesota Eating Behaviors Survey was used to assess DE. We tested for GxE by comparing the heritability of DE in twins from divo...

A model to analyze resemblances of twins and parents using LISREL is outlined and applied to sports participation and heart-rate data. Sports participation and heart rate were measured in 44 monozygotic and 46 dizygotic adolescent twin pairs and in their parents. Genetic factors influence variation in both sports behavior and heart rate, while there is no evidence for transmission from parental...

UNLABELLED The aim of this study was to analyze and to compare the dental and skeletal morphology of mono- and dizygotic twins (MZ and BZ). MATERIAL AND METHODS 10 sets of monozygotic (mean age: 18.5 years) and 10 sets of dizygotic (mean age: 19.7 years) twins were examined, cast analysis, ortopantomography and lateral cephalometric films were analyzed. RESULTS The upper frontal teeth dimen...