Purpose: We determined the correlation between sibling refractive errors adjusted for shared and unique environmental factors using data from the Collaborative Longitudinal Evaluation of Ethnicity and Refractive Error (CLEERE) Study.
Methods: Refractive error from subjects' last study visits was used to estimate the intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC) between siblings. The correlation models used environmental factors (diopter-hours and outdoor/sports activity) assessed annually from parents by survey to adjust for shared and unique environmental exposures when estimating the heritability of refractive error (2*ICC).
Results: Data from 700 families contributed to the between-sibling correlation for spherical equivalent refractive error. The mean age of the children at the last visit was 13.3 ± 0.90 years. Siblings engaged in similar amounts of near and outdoor activities (correlations ranged from 0.40-0.76). The ICC for spherical equivalent, controlling for age, sex, ethnicity, and site was 0.367 (95% confidence interval [CI] = 0.304, 0.420), with an estimated heritability of no more than 0.733. After controlling for these variables, and near and outdoor/sports activities, the resulting ICC was 0.364 (95% CI = 0.304, 0.420; estimated heritability no more than 0.728, 95% CI = 0.608, 0.850). The ICCs did not differ significantly between male-female and single sex pairs.
Conclusions: Adjusting for shared family and unique, child-specific environmental factors only reduced the estimate of refractive error correlation between siblings by 0.5%. Consistent with a lack of association between myopia progression and either near work or outdoor/sports activity, substantial common environmental exposures had little effect on this correlation. Genetic effects appear to have the major role in determining the similarity of refractive error between siblings.
Keywords: heritability; myopia; pediatric.
Copyright 2014 The Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology, Inc.