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Biomedical subjects

L Eaves

Publications and source records attributed to L Eaves.

At least 91 records · Page 5Linked to original sources
PubMed1991

The genetic epidemiology of bulimia nervosa.

OBJECTIVE: The authors seek to clarify, from both an epidemiologic and genetic perspective, the major risk factors for bulimia nervosa and to understand the relationship between narrowly defined bulimia and bulimia-like syndromes. METHOD: Personal structured psychiatric interviews were conducted with 2,163 female twins from a population-based register. Psychiatric disorders were assessed using DSM-III-R criteria. RESULTS: Lifetime prevalence and risk for narrowly defined bulimia were 2.8% and 4.2%, respectively. Including bulimia-like syndromes increased these estimates to 5.7% and 8.0%, respectively. Risk factors for bulimia included 1) birth after 1960, 2) low paternal care, 3) a history of wide weight fluctuation, dieting, or frequent exercise, 4) a slim ideal body image, 5) low self-esteem, 6) an external locus of control, and 7) high levels of neuroticism. Significant comorbidity was found between bulimia and anorexia nervosa, alcoholism, panic disorder, generalized anxiety disorder, phobia, and major depression. Proband-wise concordance for narrowly defined bulimia was 22.9% in monozygotic and 8.7% in dizygotic twins. The best-fitting model indicated that familial aggregation was due solely to genetic factors with a heritability of liability of 55%. A multiple threshold model indicated that narrowly defined bulimia nervosa and bulimia-like syndromes represented different levels of severity on the same continuum of liability. CONCLUSIONS: The liability to fully syndromal bulimia nervosa, which affects around one in 25 women at some point in their lives, is substantially influenced by both epidemiologic and genetic risk factors. The same factors that influence the risk for narrowly defined bulimia also influence the risk for less severe bulimia-like syndromes.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1988

Aortic stiffness: a new Doppler echocardiographic measure predictive of systolic blood pressure in children.

Aortic stiffness, the maximal frequency shift in the descending aorta divided by the Doppler acceleration time, was studied in 384 eleven year old twin children. The extent to which this measurement provided a prediction of systolic blood pressure that was independent of body size, heart rate, cardiac contractility and left ventricular mass was investigated. Aortic stiffness, after adjustment for height and weight, correlated significantly with systolic blood pressure (r = 0.22, p less than 0.01), but not with diastolic blood pressure. The short- (r = 0.82) and longer- (r = 0.68) term reproducibility of aortic stiffness was high. This measure appears to be a more powerful predictor of systolic blood pressure than is left ventricular mass. Aortic stiffness is a highly reproducible Doppler variable that may explain in part the contribution of the aortic wall elastic properties to the level of systolic blood pressure in preadolescent children at rest.

Analysis of Variance↗
PubMed1986

Blood serotonin concentrations and fenfluramine therapy in autistic children.

Whole-blood serotonin concentrations of 31 autistic children, aged 2 1/2 to 16 years, 10 non-autistic retarded children, and 18 children with Down syndrome were measured by a fluorometric method and compared with those of normal children of similar age range. No significant difference in the serotonin concentration per milliliter of whole blood or per 1000 platelets was found between groups for autistic, retarded, or normal children, but the values for those with Down syndrome were significantly lower. A double-blind cross-over study on the effect of fenfluramine versus placebo in seven autistic boys over a period of 8 months demonstrated a significant decrease in blood serotonin levels during the fenfluramine phase in all subjects. Slight improvements were found in short-term auditory memory and some measures of receptive language skills, particularly in children functioning at a high level. There was no significant change in global psychometric measurements of general intelligence during therapy. No adverse clinical effect was observed other than weight loss of 6% in one child. We conclude that fenfluramine may have some selective favorable effects on increasing attention in high-functioning autistic children. Blood serotonin concentration may be followed as an indication of drug compliance during fenfluramine therapy, but does not appear to reflect clinical efficacy.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1979

The use of twins in the analysis of assortative mating.

The simulations illustrated show that a plausible model for mate selection can generate data on the similarity of twins and their spouses which are remarkably consistent with a transitive model for the effects of mate selection. This is, biological considerations impose constraints upon the relative values of correlations which are not foreseen, for example, by the some advocates of conventional path models although they might be predicted by common sense. In particular, the correlation between the spouses of twins is expected to be non-zero under a model of phenotypic assortment and turns out to be approximately equal to the product of the twin correlation and the square of the marital correlation. The relative magnitudes of the correlations derived from an empirical study of such relationships should enable models of phenotypic assortment to be tested more rigorously. Including both identical and non-identical twins in the sample studied should permit the inherited and cultural components of the mating system to be identified with more conviction. In the event of one sex playing a more significant role in mate selection for particular traits, such studies should reveal diagnostic patterns of familial correlations as long as male and female twins and their spouses are analysed separately. If the analysis is restricted to phenotypic correlations of the parents, the qualitative findings do not appear to be greatly affected by selection due to assortative mating although a reduction in variance is to be expected if a large proportion of individuals is unable to mate. In such cases twins will also be significantly concordant for mating. The consequences of such varied regimes of assortation for the population structure and the relationship between traits in subsequent generations remain the object of future inquiry.

Female↗