Heritability of plasma leptin levels

Abstract

To examine the influence of genetic factors on plasma leptin levels. We measured plasma leptin levels, body mass index and body fat distribution in healthy young female monozygotic (n = 19) and dizygotic (n = 14) twins. The twin zygosity was verified by determination of short tandem repeat and amplified fragment length polymorphism systems. The genetic analysis included analysis of variance-based and maximum likelihood-based methods. Plasma leptin levels were correlated significantly with body mass index (r = 0.59, P Conclusions Genetic factors are major determinants of plasma leptin levels in humans and may account for as much as half of the variance in leptin levels.