Data Resource Profile: The Finnish TwinRegistry Project
The Older Finnish Twin Cohort was established 50 years ago and includes twins born in Finland before 1958. Members of the cohort have responded to detailed questionnaires about their health, habits, and lifestyle up to four times, in 1975, 1981, 1991, and 2011. In 2019, the Finnish Parliament approved the Act on the Secondary Use of Health and Social Data, which enables wider use of data from national social and healthcare registers as well as various patient systems and social services. This data resource article describes the linkage of the Older Finnish Twin Cohort to numerous social and healthcare registers, alongside linked data from their families and the broader Finnish population born in 1945-1957, which serves as a reference population for generalizability and other analyses.
Authors
- Jaakko A. Kaprio (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3716-2455)
- Annina Ropponen (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3031-5823)
- Antti Latvala (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5695-117X)
- Stephanie Zellers (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8927-3483)
- Terhi Maczulskij (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4325-2254)
- S. Niemi (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0007-2193-2519)
- Hannu Karhunen
- Mikko Olkkonen
Institutions
- University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (US)
- University of Helsinki (FI)
- Research Institute of the Finnish Economy (FI)
- Finnish Institute of Occupational Health (FI)
- Finland University (FI)
- Institute for Molecular Medicine Finland (FI)
- Labour Institute for Economic Research (FI)
Publication Details
- Journal
- Twin Research and Human Genetics
- Published
- 2025-10-09
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1017/thg.2025.10025
- Primary Topic
- Health disparities and outcomes
- Type
- article
- Field-Weighted Citation Impact
- 0.00