The constancy of parent-offspring similarity of total cholesterol throughout childhood and early adult life: The Lipid Research Clinics Program Prevalence Study

Abstract

In a cross-sectional study of 11,409 white parent-offspring pairs in five North American populations we examined the effect of age of the offspring on parent-offspring total cholesterol correlations. In general there were no differences in correlations by age of the offspring for the four types (by gender) of parent-offspring pairs. This was true within each of the five populations and for the average of all populations combined. For offspring from less than 2–29 years of age, these average age-specific correlations ranged from 0.17 to 0.42. Despite the considerable physiologic and environmental changes which influence cholesterol levels from birth to early adulthood, the strength of parent-offspring similarity shows no consistent pattern of change.