Twins not only have a friend from birth, they may also live longer than singletons, according to a new study. The study, published in PLOS ONE , shows that twins have lower mortality rates for both sexes.
“We find that at nearly every age, identical twins survive at higher proportions than fraternal twins, and the rate is higher for fraternal twins than the general population,” said David Sharrow, a postdoctoral researcher at University of Washington.
The data comes from the Danish Twin Registry, one of the oldest repositories of information about twins.
Researchers looked at 2,932 pairs of same-sex twins who survived past the age of 10 and were born in Denmark between 1870 and 1900. They then compared their ages at death with data for the overall Danish population.
For men, they found that the peak benefit of having a twin came in the subjects’ mid-40s. That difference is about 6 percentage points, meaning that if 84 out of 100 boys in the general population were still alive at age 45, then that number was 90 for twins.