The Relative Importance of Genes and Environments for Predicting Age at Menarche
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Genetically informed research on the association between father absence and age at menarche (AAM) has generally proceeded by determining if the unique effect of father absence persists while accounting for genetic controls. This approach has proven important for discerning potentially causal environmental effects (i.e., father absence) from genetic confounds, but suffers from a methodological asymmetry that can undermine conclusions about the relative importance of genes and environments. The purpose of this study was to examine the relative importance of a set of 10 commonly examined, ostensibly environmental predictors of AAM in comparison to genetic variation captured by a polygenic score (PGS). Dominance analysis that included 2,048 regression models was applied to longitudinal data from the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (N = 3,645 Caucasian female participants) to determine the relative importance of these 11 predictors for explaining variance in AAM. Results showed that the PGS explained more variance in AAM in than any of the environmental predictors in every model and more than double the variance of all the environmental predictors combined. Notably, father absence explained the third-most variance, falling behind BMI and prenatal smoking. The implications of these findings are discussed in terms of genetically informed research on father absence/AAM and how the asymmetry between methods of measuring genes and environment in these studies can impact the conclusions drawn.
