Assortative mating and within-spouse pair comparisons

Comparisons between cohabitating spouses have been proposed as an aetiological design method to reduce confounding and evaluate effects of the shared adulthood environment. However, assortative mating, a phenomenon where individuals select phenotypically similar mates, could distort associations. We evaluated the use of spousal comparisons, as in the within-spouse pair (WSP) model, for aetiological epidemiological research. Using directed acyclic graphs and simulations, we demonstrated that the WSP model can reduce confounding if spouses are correlated for an unmeasured confounder, but that WSP comparisons are susceptible to collider bias induced by assortative mating. Empirical analyses using spouse pairs in UK Biobank found evidence that genetic association estimates from the WSP model are attenuated compared to random pairs for single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) associated with height (shrinkage: 23%; 95% CI 20%, 25%), educational attainment (74%; 95% CI 66%, 81%) and body mass index (23%; 95% CI 14%, 32%) as well as for an alcohol consumption SNP (29%, 95% CI 5%, 46%). Some of these attenuations are likely to reflect effects of assortative mating because height and educational attainment are unlikely to be strongly influenced by the adulthood environment. In contrast, effect estimates of increasing age on coronary artery disease and systolic blood pressure were found to be concordant between random and spouse pairs. Assortative mating is likely to induce phenotypic and genetic structure between an individual and their spouse which complicates the interpretation of spousal comparisons in an aetiological context. A further consideration is that the joint participation of non-independent spouses in cohort studies could induce selection bias.