Chronic venous disease (CVD) is one of the most common cardiovascular disorders in Northern and Western Europe; however, the causative factors predisposing individuals to the disease are still under investigation. Age, sex, obesity, and family history were found to be major risk factors for CVD. Altered venous biomechanics may also contribute to the pathogenesis of venous disease. Twin studies ...

We incorporated a new Riemannian fluid registration algorithm into a general MRI analysis method called tensor-based morphometry to map the heritability of brain morphology in MR images from 23 monozygotic and 23 dizygotic twin pairs. All 92 3D scans were fluidly registered to a common template. Voxelwise Jacobian determinants were computed from the deformation fields to assess local volumetric...

Are highly heritable attitudes more or less complex than less heritable attitudes? Over 2,000 participant responses on topics varying in heritability were coded for overall integrative complexity and its 2 subcomponents (dialectical complexity and elaborative complexity). Across different heritability sets drawn from 2 separate prior twin research programs, the present results yielded a consist...

I N the prediction of genetic progress by directional selection, the most important parameter involved is the heritability ( hz ) of the character under selection, which is defined as the ratio of the additive genetic variance to the phenotypic variance ( uZp) of the population. Several experiments on directional selection (CLAYTON, MORRIS and ROBERTSON 1957; CHANG and CHAPMAN 1958; MARTIN and ...

Two F2 populations segregating for biomass yield and forage quality traits were developed from two separate crosses of tropically adapted maize inbred lines. The parental, F1 generations both evaluated to estimate broad sense heritability, genetic advance correlations these suggest the best as selection criteria towards breeding with high quality.In Cross 1, trait highest broad-sense heritabili...

Ever since the case of the missing heritability was highlighted some years ago, scientists have been investigating various possible explanations for the issue. However, none of these explanations include non-chromosomal genetic information. Here we describe explicitly how chromosomal and non-chromosomal modifiers collectively influence the heritability of a trait, in this case, the growth rate ...

The presence of gene-environment statistical interaction (GxE) and correlation (rGE) in biological development has led both practitioners and philosophers of science to question the legitimacy of heritability estimates. The paper offers a novel approach to assess the impact of GxE and rGE on the way genetic and environmental causation can be partitioned. A probabilistic framework is developed, ...

Triceps and subscapular skinfold thicknesses were measured in 222 pairs of like-sex twins (78 monozygotic and 144 dizygotic) aged 3-15 years. Log transformations of the measurements were standardized for age and sex and the results used to estimate heritability--that is, the proportion of total variation determined by genetic factors. The overall contribution of non-genetic familial effects was...