Twin-based heritability of actimetry traits

Gehrman, Philip R.; Ghorai, Arpita; Goodman, Matthew; McCluskey, Richard; Barilla, Holly; Almasy, Laura; Roenneberg, Till and Bucan, Maja (2019): Twin-based heritability of actimetry traits. In: Genes Brain and Behavior, Vol. 18, No. 5, UNSP e12569

Abstract

There is a critical need for phenotypes with substantial heritability that can be used as endophenotypes in behavioral genetic studies. Activity monitoring, called actimetry, has potential as a means of assessing sleep and circadian rhythm traits that could serve as endophenotypes relevant to a range of psychopathologies. This study examined a range of actimetry traits for heritability using a classic twin design. The sample consisted of 195 subjects from 45 monozygotic (MZ) and 50 dizygotic (DZ) twin pairs aged 16-40 years. Subjects wore both a research-grade actimeter (GENEActiv) and a consumer-oriented device (FitBit) for 2 weeks. Sleep and circadian traits were extracted from GENEActiv data using PennZzz and ChronoSapiens software programs. Sleep statistics for a limited number of FitBit-collected traits were generated by its accompanying mobile app. Broad sense heritability was computed on a set of 33 MZ and 38 DZ twin pairs with complete data using both OpenMX and SOLAR software. These analyses yielded a large number of actimetry-derived traits, 20 of which showed high heritability (h(2) > 0.6), seven of which remain significant after Bonferroni correction. These results indicate that actimetry enables assessing a range of phenotypes with substantial heritability that may be useful as endophenotypes for genetic studies.

• Item Type: Journal article
• Faculties: Medicine > Institute of Medical Psychology
• Subjects: 600 Technology > 610 Medicine and health
• ISSN: 1601-1848
• Language: English