Heritability and individuality of the plasma sodium concentration: a twin study in the United States veteran population

摘要

Little is known about the population genetics of water balance. A recent meta-genome-wide association study on plasma sodium concentration identified novel loci of high biological plausibility, yet heritability of the phenolype has never been convincingly shown in European ancestry. The present study linked the Vietnam Era Twin Registry with the Department of Veterans Affairs VistA patient care clinical database. Participants (n = 2,370, 59.6 monozygotic twins and 40.4 dizygotic twins) had a median of seven (interquartile range: 3-14) plasma sodium determinations between October 1999 and March 2017.