Genetic epidemiology of spontaneous subarachnoid hemorrhage: Nordic Twin Study

It would be essential to clinicians, familial aneurysm study groups, and aneurysm families to understand the genetic basis of subarachnoid hemorrhage (SAH), but there are no large population-based heritability estimates assessing the relative contribution of genetic and environmental factors to SAH.

We constructed the largest twin cohort to date, the population-based Nordic Twin Cohort, which comprised 79 644 complete twin pairs of Danish, Finnish, and Swedish origin. The Nordic Twin Cohort was followed up for 6.01 million person-years using nationwide cause-of-death and hospitalization registries.

One hundred eighty-eight fatal and 321 nonfatal SAH cases were recorded in the Nordic Twin Cohort. Thus, SAH incidence was 8.47 cases per 100,000 follow-up years. Data for pairwise analyses were available for a total of 504 SAH cases, of which 6 were concordant (5 monozygotic and 1 opposite sex) and 492 discordant twin pairs for SAH. The concordance for SAH in monozygotic twins was 3.1% compared with 0.27% in dizygotic twins, suggesting at most a modest role for genetic factors in the etiology of SAH. The population-based probability estimate for SAH in dizygotic siblings of a patient with SAH is 0.54%, and only 1 of 185 full siblings experience familial SAH. The corresponding risk of SAH in monozygotic twins is 5.9%. Model-fitting, which was based on the comparison of the few monozygotic and dizygotic pairs, suggested that the estimated heritability of SAH is 41%.

SAH appears to be mainly of nongenetic origin, and familial SAHs can mostly be attributed to environmental risk factors.