The heritability of doctor-diagnosed traumatic and degenerative meniscus tears

To estimate the genetic contribution to traumatic and degenerative meniscus tears for men and women across the lifespan.

We linked the Swedish Twin Register with individual-level national healthcare data to form a 30-year, population-wide, longitudinal twin cohort. To study genetic contribution to meniscus tears, we estimated the heritability and familial risk using incident traumatic and degenerative tear diagnostic codes in a cohort of 88,414 monozygotic and dizygotic twin-pairs, aged ≥17 years.

During follow-up, 3,372 (3.8%) of 88,414 twins were diagnosed with a traumatic or degenerative meniscus tear. The heritability was 0.39 (95% CI = 0.32-0.47) for men and 0.43 (95% CI = 0.36-0.50) for women, and did not vary by age. Environmental factors that were unique to each twin in a pair explained a greater proportion of the variance than genetic factors, both for men (0.61, 95% CI = 0.53-0.68) and women (0.57, 95% CI = 0.50-0.64). Separate analyses of traumatic vs degenerative meniscus tears yielded similar results.

For the first time, we have estimated the genetic contribution to doctor-diagnosed meniscus tears using a twin study design. We found a relatively low to modest heritability for meniscus tears (∼40%). The heritability was also fairly stable over the lifespan, and equal in both men and women. Our findings suggest that environmental risk factors are a more important contributor to both traumatic and degenerative doctor-diagnosed meniscus tears than genetic factors.