Prevalence and heritability of handedness in a Hong Kong Chinese twin and singleton sample
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Date
22/04/2020Author
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N/A
KT160031
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Abstract
Background Left-handedness prevalence has been consistently reported at around 10% with heritability estimates at around 25%. Higher left-handedness prevalence has been reported in males and in twins. Lower prevalence has been reported in Asia, but it remains unclear whether this is due to biological or cultural factors. Most studies are based on samples with European ethnicities and using the preferred hand for writing as key assessment. Here, we investigated handedness in a sample of Chinese school children in Hong Kong, including 426 singletons and 205 pairs of twins, using both the Edinburgh Handedness Inventory and Pegboard Task. Results Based on a binary definition of writing hand, we found a higher prevalence of left-handedness (8%) than what was previously reported in Asian datasets. We found no evidence of increased left-handedness in twins, but our results were in line with previous findings showing that males have a higher tendency to be left-handed than females. Heritability was similar for both hand preference (21%) and laterality indexes (22%). However, these two handedness measures present only a moderate correlation (.42) and appear to be underpinned by different genetic factors. Conclusion In summary, we report new reference data for an ethnic group usually underrepresented in the literature. Our heritability analysis supports the idea that different measures will capture different components of handedness and, as a consequence, datasets assessed with heterogeneous criteria are not easily combined or compared.
Citation
Zheng , M , McBride , C , Ho , C S-H , Chan , J K-C , Choy , K W & Paracchini , S 2020 , ' Prevalence and heritability of handedness in a Hong Kong Chinese twin and singleton sample ' , BMC Psychology , vol. 8 , 37 . https://doi.org/10.1186/s40359-020-00401-9
Publication
BMC Psychology
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
2050-7283Type
Journal article
Rights
Copyright © 2019 the Author(s). Copyright © The Author(s). 2020. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License,which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
Description
Funding: Research Grants Council of the Hong Kong Special Administration Region (CUHK8/CRF/13G & C4054-17WF), by an internal grant entitled “Reading Development in Chinese and in English: Genetics and Neuroscience Correlates”(4930703) from The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CM is the PI on both grants), by a Hong Kong: Scotland Collaborative Research Partnership award from the Hong Kong Grants Council (CMis the PI for the Hong Kong side) and the Scottish Funding Council (SP is the PI for the Scotland side). It was additionally funded by an International Exchange Kan Tongo Po Visiting Fellowship to SP. SP is a Royal Society University Research Fellow.Collections
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