Identical Twins Who Differ in in Adult Class Position Have Different Health Outcomes

[Hannah Bell]

Background

What Did the Researchers Do?

They looked at how much education each twin had and their social class in later life, and they analyzed these in relation to diverse health outcomes (blood pressure, cholesterol, body mass index) in 308 pairs of female twins recruited in California.


What Did the Researchers Find?

They found that the monozygotic twins who differed later in life in their social class tended to have differences in health, with the working-class twin having higher blood pressure and higher cholesterol than her professional counterpart. By contrast, differences in education made no difference to these measures of health.


What Do These Findings Mean?

It is already believed that social class in children may affect later health; these results suggest that even individuals who had the same social class in childhood may have different health because of adult social class, including their living conditions after completing their educations. The implication is that interventions to eliminate social inequalities in health must take into account adult as well as childhood living conditions.


http://medicine.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?SESSID=1abea500986ab82cc9043b47e20a2aef&request=get-document&doi=10.1371/journal.pmed.0020162

[girl gone mad]

1. I think my generation..

may be the first in recent history to have shorter lifespans than our parents. In part because of the loss of job security, the increase in expected productivity and the rise in basic health care costs. But also because we are bigger, which will mean higher rates of heart disease and diabetes.