Effects of Social Attitude Change on Smoking Heritability

Societal attitudes and norms to female smoking changed in Spain in the mid-twentieth century from a restrictive to a tolerant, and an even pro-smoking, posture, while social attitudes remained stable for males. We explored whether this difference in gender-related social norms influenced the heritability of two tobacco use measures: lifetime smoking and number of years smoking. We used a population-based sample of 2285 twins (mean age = 55.78; SD = 7.45; 58% females) whose adolescence began between the mid-1950s and the early 1980s. After modeling the effect of sex and year of birth on the variance components, we observed that the impact of the genetic and shared environmental factors varied differently by birth cohort between males and females. For females, shared environment explained a higher proportion of variance than the genetic factors in older cohorts. However, this situation was inverted in the younger female cohorts. In contrast, no birth cohort effect was observed for males, where the impact of the genetic and environmental factors remained constant throughout the study period. These results suggest that heritability is larger in a permissive social environment, whereas shared-environmental factors are more relevant in a society that is less tolerant to smoking.