An Initiative in Spain for the Study of Women's Health: The Murcia Twin Registry

Abstract

The present article describes the initial steps taken in setting up a twin registry in Spain. The Murcia Twin Registry (MTR) will focus initially on perimenopausal women's health. It will be administered and managed by the University of Murcia and the Murcia Health Council and will start with a database of 452 pairs of female twins born between 1940 and 1965 in the region of Murcia, Spain. Once the MTR is established and has gained some experience, our goal is to expand the age range and include males and opposite-sex twins. The current main areas of research interest are menopause, preventive behaviors, lifestyle and health as well as quality of life.

Heritability of body mass index in pre-adolescence, young adulthood and late adulthood

“…Intra-pair correlations were obtained from twelve studies, of which seven were carried out in Europe [19][20][21][26][27][28][29] and five in the United States [8,[30][31][32][33]. We acquired IPDs for the remaining studies from three European twin cohorts [13,[15][16][17] and an American twin registry [14].…”

“…In addition to published articles, we obtained IPDs from the Netherlands Twin Registry (NTR) [13], Carolina African American Twin Study of Aging (CAATSA) [14], Murcia Twin Register (MTR) [15] and the Leuven Longitudinal Twin Study (LLTS) [16], which used subjects from the East Flanders Prospective Twin Study (EFPTS) [17], comprising a total of 1,223 twin pairs. The height and weight data in the IPDs were used to calculate BMI and intra-twin pair correlations in order for it to be in a comparable format to the published data.…”

Heritability of siesta and night-time sleep as continuously assessed by a circadian-related integrated measure

“…As of today, the registry has collected information from 2281 individual twins. More detailed description regarding characteristics and procedures of the MTR can be found elsewhere 32 , 33 . The MTR management and data collection procedures have been approved by the Committee of Research Ethics of the University of Murcia and it follows national regulations regarding personal data protection.…”

Cohort Profile: Nausea and vomiting during pregnancy genetics consortium (NVP Genetics Consortium)

“…The MTR sample is population-based and consists of all twin pairs born between 1940 and 1966, with administrative residence in the Region of Murcia, in Southeast Spain (MTR; see refs 27 , 28 ). For the NVP Genetics Consortium, the MTR has provided data on 551 women consisting of 294 from MZ twin pairs and 257 from DZ same-sex twin pairs.…”