In a lot of ways Twinsburg's annual festival is a lot like any other carnival or county fair. There are amusement park rides, overpriced lemonade and fried dough, and a stage with amateur entertainment. But at this festival it's hard to stand out in the crowd - because almost everybody is standing next to someone who looks just like them.
RIDGEWAY: Are you identical or fraternal? Identical? Ok - Here's a pen and there you go ...
Bari Ridgeway is collecting surveys about women's health for a study at the Cleveland Clinic. She's here along with a half dozen or so other medical research teams collecting data from twins that will help them tease out the difference between genetic and environmental causes of disease. Ridgeway says getting this many twins in one place is almost impossible any other way
RIDGEWAY: I probably wouldn't even try to do it to be honest. It's hard to use registries and other things with confidentiality issues it makes it very, very difficult.
But today she's nearly gotten her full quota .
RIDGEWAY: Our goal is 300 twin sets and we have 265, so we're almost there (laughs)
Twins who participate in the studies say they're doing it for a variety of reasons -
Twin 1: They gave us $10.
Cuda: They gave you $10?
Twin 2: And they gave us free lotions!
Twin 1: And this is $125 … that's a lot of money, but its very good, identical twins are rare, they need to know things.
A few feet away twins are spitting in vials and getting their cheeks' swabbed for a study on the bacteria that live in our mouths and intestinal tracts.
RESEARCHER: So we're looking at the mouth bacteria or flora and we're gonna compare it and try to figure out the bugs that reside on our body, what do they do? How do they affect our genetics and is it because of our genetic makeup that certain bugs settle on us and other's don't or is it more because of environmental factors like diet.
Studies pay anywhere from 10 to 150 dollars and range from simple surveys to more extensive collections of blood, saliva, urine, or well, you get the idea. Researchers have come from Boston, Chicago and Cleveland and are looking for clues to help them prevent everything from Crohn's disease to wrinkles. Dr. Amirlak is from the plastic surgery department at University Hospitals
AMIRLAK: We're doing a very interesting study comparing the photograph of identical twins
Amirlak says by comparing a person's personal habits - things like smoking, sun exposure or stress to the amount of wrinkles in their photographs they can learn things about factors that contribute to aging. And he says sometimes the answers might surprise you.
AMIRLAK: For example people who are widowed apparently look younger. We don't really know why….
Hmmm. I think I'll stick to the sunscreen. Gretchen Cuda, 90.3.