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Article History

Received: 18 November 2024

Accepted: 24 June 2026

First Online: 21 July 2026

Ethics

Competing interests: The authors declare no competing interests.

Consent for publication: Consent has been given by the data controller (METADAC UK).

Ethics approval: Access to the genetic data was granted through METADAC following the review and approval of the research proposal, in accordance with METADAC governance procedures and data access agreements. Thus, ethical approval for this study was granted by the data provider ( ), as they require that all proposed studies do “not violate (or potentially violate) any of the ethical permissions granted to the study* from which data or samples are requested”. We confirm that all research was performed in accordance with relevant named guidelines and regulations.

Informed consent: This study uses secondary data from Understanding Society: the UK Household Longitudinal Study (UKHLS), including genetic data accessed through the Managing Ethico-social, Technical and Administrative Issues in Data Access (METADAC) governance framework. No new data were collected for this research, and the authors had no contact with study participants. The analyses reported in this paper were conducted using existing de-identified data. As the study involved secondary analysis of anonymised data and did not involve the collection of new data from human participants, no additional participant consent was required for the present research.