Abstract
The present study examined the adequacy of a three-item parent questionnaire in determining the zygosity of young Chinese twins and whether there was any association between parent response accuracy and some demographic variables. The sample consisted of 334 pairs of same-sex Chinese twins aged from 3 to 11 years. Three scoring methods, namely the summed score, logistic regression, and decision tree, were employed to evaluate parent response accuracy of twin zygosity based on single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) information. The results showed that all three methods achieved high level of accuracy ranging from 91 to 93 % which was comparable to the accuracy rates in previous Chinese twin studies. Correlation results also showed that the higher the parents’ education level or the family income was, the more likely parents were able to tell correctly that their twins are identical or fraternal. The present findings confirmed the validity of using a three-item parent questionnaire to determine twin zygosity in a Chinese school-aged twin sample.
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Funding
This study was funded by the Research Grants Council of the Hong Kong Special Administration Region (HKU743907H & CUHK8/CRF/13G) and the Wellcome Trust of the United Kingdom (082498/z/07).
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Connie Suk-Han Ho, Mo Zheng, Bonnie Wing-Yin Chow, Simpson W. L. Wong, Cadmon K. P. Lim, and Mary M. Y. Waye declare that they have no conflict of interest.
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All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.
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Informed consent was obtained from parents of all individual child participants included in the study.
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Edited by Yoon-Mi Hur.
Appendix
Appendix
The Chinese Version of the Zygosity Questionnaire
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Ho, C.SH., Zheng, M., Chow, B.WY. et al. Adequacy of Using a Three-Item Questionnaire to Determine Zygosity in Chinese Young Twins. Behav Genet 47, 244–254 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10519-016-9826-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10519-016-9826-y