Educational Attainment of Same-Sex and Opposite-Sex Dizygotic Twins: An Individual-Level Pooled Study of 19 Twin Cohorts

Comparing twins from same- and opposite-sex pairs can provide information on potential sex differences in a variety of outcomes, including socioeconomic-related outcomes such as educational attainment. It has been suggested that this design can be applied to examine the putative role of intrauterine exposure to testosterone for educational attainment, but the evidence is still disputed. Thus, we established an international database of twin data from 11 countries with 88,290 individual dizygotic twins born over 100 years and tested for differences between twins from same- and opposite-sex dizygotic pairs in educational attainment. Effect sizes with 95% confidence intervals (CI) were estimated by linear regression models after adjusting for birth year and twin study cohort. In contrast to the hypothesis, no difference was found in women (β = −0.05 educational years, 95% CI −0.11, 0.02). However, men with a same-sex co-twin were slightly more educated than men having an opposite-sex co-twin (β = 0.14 educational years, 95% CI 0.07, 0.21). No consistent differences in effect sizes were found between individual twin study cohorts representing Europe, the USA, and Australia or over the cohorts born during the 20th century, during which period the sex differences in education reversed favoring women in the latest birth cohorts. Further, no interaction was found with maternal or paternal education. Our results contradict the hypothesis that there would be differences in the intrauterine testosterone levels between same-sex and opposite-sex female twins affecting education. Our findings in men may point to social dynamics within same-sex twin pairs that may benefit men in their educational careers

Migration Routes of New World Sanderlings (Calidris alba)

We color-marked Sanderlings (Calidris alba Pallas) at 19 locations in 6 countries in the New World and coordinated a network of volunteers to locate banded individuals in migration over a five-year period. The observers reported 252 independent sightings of birds in countries different from the country of banding. Sanderlings that migrate north to the Arctic from Chile and Peru travel principally through the central corridor (Texas and northward) of the United States and Canada; smaller numbers follow the Pacific coast. A few migrate north from the Pacific coast of South America along the Atlantic coast of the United States. Southbound from the Arctic to coastal Chile and Peru, many individuals switch eastward to stopovers on the Atlantic coast, including birds that migrated north along the U.S. Pacific coast. Sanderlings banded in Brazil during the nonbreeding period appear only on the U.S. Atlantic coast in migration. Our results emphasize the individual nature of migration. We found considerable heterogeneity in migratory behavior among individuals that spend the nonbreeding season together on the same beaches. Individuals from widely separated nonbreeding sites often shared similar pathways. In this species and perhaps in others, no simple single migratory route connects breeding with nonbreeding regions

Genetic Variants Associated With Circulating Liver Injury Markers in Mexican Americans, a Population at Risk for Non-alcoholic Fatty Liver Disease

Objective: Mexican Americans are disproportionally affected by non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD), liver fibrosis and hepatocellular carcinoma. Noninvasive means to identify those in this population at high risk for these diseases are urgently needed. Approach: The Cameron County Hispanic Cohort (CCHC) is a population-based cohort with high rates of obesity (51%), type 2 diabetes (28%) and NAFLD (49%). In a subgroup of 564 CCHC subjects, we evaluated 339 genetic variants previously reported to be associated with liver injury markers aspartate aminotransferase (AST) and alanine aminotransferase (ALT) in United Kingdom and Japanese cohorts. Results: Association was confirmed for 86 variants. Among them, 27 had higher effect allele frequency in the CCHC than in the United Kingdom and Japanese cohorts, and 16 had stronger associations with AST and ALT than rs738409 (PNPLA3). These included rs17710008 (MYCT1), rs2519093 (ABO), rs1801690 (APOH), rs10409243 (S1PR2), rs1800759 (LOC100507053) and rs2491441 (RGL1), which were also associated with steatosis and/or liver fibrosis measured by vibration-controlled transient elastography. Main contributors to advanced fibrosis risk were rs11240351 (CNTN2), rs1800759 (LOC100507053), rs738409 (PNPLA3) and rs1801690 (APOH), with advanced fibrosis detected in 37.5% of subjects with 3 of these 4 variants [AOR = 11.6 (95% CI) = 3.8-35.3]. AST- and ALT-associated variants implicated distinct pathways (ethanol and galactose degradation versus antigen presentation and B cell development). Finally, 8 variants, including rs62292950 (DNAJC13), were associated with gut microbiome changes. Conclusion: These genotype-phenotype findings may have utility in risk modeling and disease prevention in this high-risk population

Challenges and strategies for recruitment of minorities to clinical research and trials

Minority populations are largely absent from clinical research trials. The neglect of these populations has become increasingly apparent, with escalating cancer burdens and chronic disease. The challenges to recruitment of minorities in the United States are multiple including trust or lack thereof. Keys to successful recruitment are responding to community issues, its history, beliefs, and its social and economic pressures. The strategy we have used in many low-income, sometimes remote, communities is to recruit staff from the same community and train them in the required basic research methods. They are the first line of communication. After our arrival in the Texas Rio Grande Valley in 2001, we applied these principles learned over years of global research, to studies of chronic diseases. Beginning in 2004, we recruited and trained a team of local women who enrolled in a cohort of over five thousand Mexican Americans from randomly selected households. This cohort is being followed, and the team has remained, acquiring not only advanced skills (ultrasound, FibroScan, retinal photos, measures of cognition, etc.) but capacity to derive key health information. Currently, we are participating in multiple funded studies, including an NIH clinical trial, liver disease, obesity, and diabetes using multiomics aimed at developing precision medicine approaches to chronic disease prevention and treatment

Test of Prosody via Syllable Emphasis (“TOPsy”): Psychometric Validation of a Brief Scalable Test of Lexical Stress Perception

Prosody perception is fundamental to spoken language communication as it supports comprehension, pragmatics, morphosyntactic parsing of speech streams, and phonological awareness. A particular aspect of prosody: perceptual sensitivity to speech rhythm patterns in words (i.e., lexical stress sensitivity), is also a robust predictor of reading skills, though it has received much less attention than phonological awareness in the literature. Given the importance of prosody and reading in educational outcomes, reliable and valid tools are needed to conduct large-scale health and genetic investigations of individual differences in prosody, as groundwork for investigating the biological underpinnings of the relationship between prosody and reading. Motivated by this need, we present the Test of Prosody via Syllable Emphasis (&ldquo;TOPsy&rdquo;) and highlight its merits as a phenotyping tool to measure lexical stress sensitivity in as little as 10 min, in scalable internet-based cohorts. In this 28-item speech rhythm perception test [modeled after the stress identification test from Wade-Woolley (2016)], participants listen to multi-syllabic spoken words and are asked to identify lexical stress patterns. Psychometric analyses in a large internet-based sample shows excellent reliability, and predictive validity for self-reported difficulties with speech-language, reading, and musical beat synchronization. Further, items loaded onto two distinct factors corresponding to initially stressed vs. non-initially stressed words. These results are consistent with previous reports that speech rhythm perception abilities correlate with musical rhythm sensitivity and speech-language/reading skills, and are implicated in reading disorders (e.g., dyslexia). We conclude that TOPsy can serve as a useful tool for studying prosodic perception at large scales in a variety of different settings, and importantly can act as a validated brief phenotype for future investigations of the genetic architecture of prosodic perception, and its relationship to educational outcomes. &nbsp;</p