The Qingdao Twin Registry: a status update.

In 1998, the Qingdao Twin Registry was initiated as the main part of the Chinese National Twin Registry. By 2005, a total of 10,655 twin pairs had been recruited. Since then new twin cohorts have been sampled, with one longitudinal cohort of adolescent twins selected to explore determinants of metabolic disorders and health behaviors during puberty and young adulthood. Adult twins have been sampled for studying heritability of multiple phenotypes associated with metabolic disorders. In addition, an elderly twin cohort has been recruited with a focus on genetic studies of aging-related phenotypes using twin modeling and genome-wide association analysis. Cross-cultural collaborative studies have been carried out between China, Denmark, Finland, and US cohorts. Ongoing data collection and analysis for the Qingdao Twin Registry will be discussed in this article.