Warning: please don’t read if you are triggered by a discussion of post-mortem analysis (might come up in the comments).
I want to have my body donated to science, well, afterwards, and to convince my twin sister to organize the same thing; there’s probably a dearth of comparative post-mortem studies of adult (aged) human twins. However, my husband said he wouldn’t do it. I don’t want to argue with him about something we both hope won’t be an issue for many years to come, so, in pure scientific interest:
what would you think it would be interesting to study in such a setting?
Sorry if I offended you, it wasn’t my intention. Just can’t ask this on facebook, my Mom would eat me alive.
You could look into joining a twin registry. Discordant-twin designs are fairly powerful, but still need _n_>50 or something like that to be worth doing. Plus if you keep your own novel set of data, people will be less interested in analyzing it compared to a twin registry using a familiar set of questionnaires/scales/measures. (One of the reasons you see so much from twin registries or the UK Biobank: consistent measurements.) It would’ve been best if you two had been enrolled as kids, but perhaps better late than never.
Consider creating detailed records of lifestyle differences between you and your sister. Perhaps keep a diary (in effect creating a longitudinal dataset for folks to look at later).
There is an enormous interest in disentangling lifestyle choices from genetics for all sorts of health and nutrition questions.
Thank you for considering this, I think this could be very valuable.
I think she will be open to it. Here’s hope. People usually don’t get it, how having a twin makes you feel you live an experiment—same clothes or different clothes (but people say different things to you when they see you in them—“why?”), same favourite poems and different ones (so weird, really). Always thought it a shame, to have so much material go to waste.
Warning: please don’t read if you are triggered by a discussion of post-mortem analysis (might come up in the comments).
I want to have my body donated to science, well, afterwards, and to convince my twin sister to organize the same thing; there’s probably a dearth of comparative post-mortem studies of adult (aged) human twins. However, my husband said he wouldn’t do it. I don’t want to argue with him about something we both hope won’t be an issue for many years to come, so, in pure scientific interest:
what would you think it would be interesting to study in such a setting?
Sorry if I offended you, it wasn’t my intention. Just can’t ask this on facebook, my Mom would eat me alive.
You could look into joining a twin registry. Discordant-twin designs are fairly powerful, but still need _n_>50 or something like that to be worth doing. Plus if you keep your own novel set of data, people will be less interested in analyzing it compared to a twin registry using a familiar set of questionnaires/scales/measures. (One of the reasons you see so much from twin registries or the UK Biobank: consistent measurements.) It would’ve been best if you two had been enrolled as kids, but perhaps better late than never.
Consider creating detailed records of lifestyle differences between you and your sister. Perhaps keep a diary (in effect creating a longitudinal dataset for folks to look at later).
There is an enormous interest in disentangling lifestyle choices from genetics for all sorts of health and nutrition questions.
Thank you for considering this, I think this could be very valuable.
Do you think that having one pair of twins is enough to get valuable data from it?
In the hierarchy of evidence, this would be a “case study.” So the value is not as high as a proper study, but non-zero.
I think she will be open to it. Here’s hope. People usually don’t get it, how having a twin makes you feel you live an experiment—same clothes or different clothes (but people say different things to you when they see you in them—“why?”), same favourite poems and different ones (so weird, really). Always thought it a shame, to have so much material go to waste.