16/10/2026
What happens when a twin registry becomes connected to the wider data world?
2026 Twin Research and Human Genetics Special Issue explores how record linkage is expanding the scientific potential of twin research.
Across 20 contributions from 13 countries and two multinational initiatives, twin resources are being linked to health, education, income, employment, mortality, family, environmental, genomic and other population data.
The examples are remarkably diverse — from multigenerational pedigrees and pathology records to air pollution, inequality indicators and even dog ownership. Together, they show how linkage can extend follow-up across decades, fill gaps in existing cohorts, create new genetically informative designs and enable questions that neither twin cohorts nor administrative data could answer alone.
We hope the Special Issue inspires twin registries to look at the data resources around them — and imagine what could be linked next.
