Mycobacterium tuberculosis is transmitted through the air from an infectious patient (index patient) to other persons (contacts) who share space. Exposure to M. tuberculosis can result in tuberculosis (TB) disease or latent TB infection (LTBI), which has no clinical symptoms or radiologic evidence of disease. The cycle of transmission can be ended by isolating and treating patients with TB dise...

Wellbeing is a major topic of research across several disciplines, reflecting the increasing recognition of its strong value across major domains in life. Previous twin-family studies have revealed that individual differences in wellbeing are accounted for by both genetic as well as environmental factors. A systematic literature search identified 30 twin-family studies on wellbeing or a related...

In recent years, substantial effort has gone into disentangling the genetic contribution to individual differences in behaviour (such as personality and temperament traits). Heritability estimates from twin and family studies, and more recently using whole genome approaches, suggest a substantial genetic component to these traits. However, efforts to identify the genes that influence these trai...

This review summarizes current research on the genetics of insomnia, as genetic contributions are thought to be important for insomnia etiology. We begin by providing an overview of genetic methods (both quantitative and measured gene), followed by a discussion of the insomnia genetics literature with regard to each of the following common methodologies: twin and family studies, candidate gene ...

For a better understanding of the biological mechanisms involved in complex traits or diseases, networks are often useful tools in genetic studies: coexpression networks based on pairwise correlations between genes are commonly used. In case of a family-based design, it can be problematic when there is a large between-family variation in expression levels. We propose here a gene coexpression ne...

Many authors view schizophrenia as a neurodevelopmental disorder. Knowledge of whether patients have morphologic variants that occur during the development of different anatomic areas of the brain and an understanding of the relation between such variants and brain development or prenatal exposure to possible noxae could provide clues about the events that lead to schizophrenia. Nonspecific mor...

The Australian Twin Registry (ATR) has, since the late 1970s, enrolled more than 30,000 pairs of all zygosity types and ages willing to consider participation in approved research studies. Its core functions are the recruitment to, and maintenance of, an up-to-date database containing contact details and baseline information, and the management of fair and equitable access so as to enhance medi...

An increasingly popular research method for identifying etiologic heterogeneity in psychiatric illness has been to compare the frequency of a risk factor in affected individuals with no affected relatives (sporadic cases) and in affected individuals with one or more affected relatives (familial cases). This paper presents a power analysis of this familial vs sporadic method, assuming a multifac...

Following a suggestion in an Editorial in the British Journal of Anaesthesia in November of 1967, we wrote to this Journal and others in the United Kingdom, ofFering to provide a service of cholinesterase estimations and dibucaine and fluoride numbers for anaesthetists in the United Kingdom. It was hoped that, on their part, those who sent serum would co-operate with us in elucidating any inter...