Effects of Social Attitude Change on Smoking Heritability

Laura Mezquita,Juan R Ordoñana,Lucía Colodro-Conde,Juan F Sánchez-Romera,Manuel I Ibáñez,José J Morosoli,Generós Ortet

doi:10.1007/s10519-017-9871-1

Abstract

Societal attitudes and norms to female smoking changed in Spain in the mid-twentieth century from a restrictive to a tolerant, and an even pro-smoking, posture, while social attitudes remained stable for males. We explored whether this difference in gender-related social norms influenced the heritability of two tobacco use measures: lifetime smoking and number of years smoking. We used a population-based sample of 2285 twins (mean age = 55.78; SD = 7.45; 58% females) whose adolescence began between the mid-1950s and the early 1980s. After modeling the effect of sex and year of birth on the variance components, we observed that the impact of the genetic and shared environmental factors varied differently by birth cohort between males and females. For females, shared environment explained a higher proportion of variance than the genetic factors in older cohorts. However, this situation was inverted in the younger female cohorts. In contrast, no birth cohort effect was observed for males, where the impact of the genetic and environmental factors remained constant throughout the study period. These results suggest that heritability is larger in a permissive social environment, whereas shared-environmental factors are more relevant in a society that is less tolerant to smoking.

Highlights

Tobacco primarily influences health negatively by favoring heart, respiratory and cardiovascular disease, and lung cancer, among others (Maritz and Mutemwa 2012)
5 Department of Genetics and Computational Biology, QIMR Berghofer Medical Research Institute, Brisbane, Australia throughout the study period. These results suggest that heritability is larger in a permissive social environment, whereas shared-environmental factors are more relevant in a society that is less tolerant to smoking
Behavior genetics studies support the notion that genetic factors and shared environment are mainly responsible for individual differences in smoking initiation, while the influence of unique environment increases when smoking becomes a regular habit, and includes measures of the amount of tobacco smoked, regular use, dependence and persistence (Li et al 2003)

Summary

Introduction

Tobacco primarily influences health negatively by favoring heart, respiratory and cardiovascular disease, and lung cancer, among others (Maritz and Mutemwa 2012). Tobacco kills nearly 6 million people each year worldwide, and around 16% of deaths in Europe are attributed to it (WHO 2013). For these reasons, knowing which factors contribute to individual differences in tobacco use is essential to adopt prevention and treatment strategies. The shared environment influence decreases if we compare smoking initiation to regular tobacco use, at least in males (Li et al 2003). It has been hypothesized that changes in the macro-environment (e.g., gender inequalities regarding attitudes toward smoking) may modify the heritability of tobacco outcomes,

Methods

Results

Conclusion