Twins and cigarettes

Specialised in genetics of dependence, Professor Jaakko Kaprio deals with extensive public health problems.

Academy Professor Jaakko Kaprio is widely recognised as one of the world-leading experts in the genetics of dependence. His special field of expertise is to find answers to the key questions of nicotine dependence and its consequences to public health.
Professor Kaprio perceives his own career as consisting of three, partly separate phases. In the beginning, he was a more traditional epidemiologist. The following  step was to combine epidemiology with genetics. Just before the millennium Kaprio widened his field of research to cover the interaction between the genes and the environmental factors — including the most topical questions of epigenetics.

“Today, our investigations over nicotine dependence are extended to map and characterise the genes and epigenetic mechanisms which predispose to nicotine dependence and can explain the connection between smoking and smoking-related diseases,” explains Kaprio, Professor of Genetic Epidemiology at the University of Helsinki and Research Professor in Behavioral Genetics at the National Institute of Health and Welfare.

Some of the latest findings by Kaprio’s group were elaborated in a leading neurological publication, Neurology this year. The study indicates that smoking, high blood pressure and high cholesterol increase the mortality of subarachnoidal haemorrhage survivors.

Father of world-famous twins

Kaprio is also well known as a father of a unique twin cohort study. The twin study began in 1974 at the University of Helsinki, and more than 550 articles from the study have been published in international journals. Additionally some 50 doctoral theses have been completed.

Researchers engaged in twin study investigate the contribution of genetic factors to individual differences. “Data from twins is a means to estimate gene-environment interactions, but also to evaluate variability genes. Data from same-sex and opposite sex twins can also be used to investigate the origins of gender differences,” Kaprio specifies.

Twin designs have been utilised to test causal hypotheses between exposures and later (disease) outcomes, to estimate the shared genetic or environmental components between two or more traits as well as to estimate the genetic contribution to developmental processes using various longitudinal models.