Romania might have a twin registry, as a first. The initiative belongs to the researchers from Babes-Bolyai University in Cluj-Napoca, central Romania. The experts want to find out how some genetic factors, but also the environment, can influence such features as personality, intelligence or emotional development. Subscribing to this register is free of any charge.
Researchers from the Cognitive Neurosciences Laboratory in Cluj focus on twins, as they shared the same space until birth.
The registry is still under the pilot stage and Romanian twins aged over 18, can join it. The studies will be conducted online or with the help of research operators who will travel to the cities where twins are living.
Besides benefitting of medical tests free of any charge, the twins will have the opportunity of meeting other pairs of twins in the same region or country, Digi 24 reports.
Until now, 28 countries on five continents drafted this registry, with over one million and a half twins being put on the spot.
A twin registry is a data of information about both identical twins or fraternal twins, which is often maintained by an academic institution, such as a university, or by other research institutions.
The Swedish Twin Registry is the largest twin database in the world, with approximately 85,000 twin pairs.
Twin registries use a number of strategies to try to reduce the risk of recruitment bias. Some twin registries are “mandatory” – that is, for example, under the public health laws of Norway, all births of twins since 1967 have been recorded in a twin registry maintained by the Norwegian government. By comparison, enlisting with the Australian Twin Registry is voluntary.
Identical twins” (monozygotic twins) share virtually all their genes with each other, and “fraternal twins” (dizygotic twins), on average, share about 50% of their genes with each other (about the same amount of sharing as non-twin siblings). Both types of twin pairs in twin registries almost always share similar prenatal and early childhood environments as well. By determining what are called “concordance” rates for a disease or trait among identical and fraternal twin pairs, researchers can estimate whether contributing factors for that disease or trait are more likely to be hereditary, environmental, or some combination of these. A concordance rate is a statistical measure of probability – if one twin has a specific trait or disease, what is the probability that the other twin has (or will develop) that same trait or disease.