The Nordic twin study on cancer - NorTwinCan

Abstract

Nordic twin studies have played a critical role in understanding cancer etiology and elucidating the nature of familial effects on site-specific cancers. The NorTwinCan consortium is a collaborative effort that capitalizes on unique research advantages made possible through the Nordic system of registries. It was constructed by linking the population-based twin registries of Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden to their country-specific national cancer and cause-of-death registries. These linkages enable the twins to be followed many decades for cancer incidence and mortality. To date, two major linkages have been conducted: NorTwinCan I in 2011–2012 and NorTwinCan II in 2018. Overall, there are 315,413 eligible twins, 57,236 incident cancer cases and 58 years of follow-up, on average. In the initial phases of our work, NorTwinCan established the world’s most comprehensive twin database for studying cancer, developed novel analytical approaches tailored to address specific research considerations within the context of the Nordic data and leveraged these models and data in research publications that provide the most accurate estimates of heritability and familial risk of cancers reported in the literature to date. Our findings indicate an excess familial risk for nearly all cancers and demonstrate that the incidence of cancer among twins mirrors the rate in the general population. They also revealed that twin concordance for cancer most often manifests across, rather than within, cancer sites, and we are currently focusing on the analysis of these cross-cancer associations.