Assortative mating may explain spouses' risk of same disease

doi:10.1136/bmj.326.7385.396/a

BMJ 2003;326:396 ( 15 February )

Letters

Assortative mating may explain spouses' risk of same disease

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

EDITOR $---$ Hippisley-Cox et al observed significant similarities for disease between spouses in a large sample of 8386 couplesrecruited through general practice.¹ They think that sharedenvironmental factors may cause these similarities but rejectassortative mating as anexplanation.

In a sample from the Netherlands twin register we could not replicate their spouse similarities for asthma, depression, diabetes,and cardiovascular disease, possibly because of our smaller samplesize of 2152 spouse pairs.² When we examined health behaviourin a larger sample we found good associations between spousesfor smoking, alcohol problems, and exercise behaviour, even aftercontrolling for age and body mass index of bothspouses.

The duration of the relationship influenced these associations between spouses (figure). Except for alcohol problems, spousesimilarities in health behaviour decreased as the duration ofthe relationship increased. This implies that assortment for thesefactors is based on similarity at the time dating began³ and. . . [Full text of this article]