Genetic taste blindness to bitter and body composition in childhood: a Mendelian randomization design

Running Head: Mendelian Randomization Using Genetic Information to Infer Causality in Observational Data: Mendelian Randomization

Lactase persistence and bitter taste response: instrumental variables and mendelian randomization in epidemiologic studies of dietary factors and cancer risk.

Consumption of dairy products seems to increase the risk of cancer at several sites, while intake of cruciferous vegetables could have protective effects. However, these dietary intakes are subject to measurement error, and associations with cancer could be due to confounders. Mendelian randomization has been suggested as a way to overcome confounding by exploiting the random allocation of alle...

Body mass index and psychiatric disorders: a Mendelian randomization study

Obesity is a highly prevalent risk factor for cardiometabolic diseases. Observational studies suggest that obesity is associated with psychiatric traits, but causal inference from such studies has several limitations. We used two-sample Mendelian randomization methods (inverse variance weighting, weighted median and MR-Egger regression) to evaluate the association of body mass index (BMI) with ...

Bilirubin and Stroke Risk Using a Mendelian Randomization Design.

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE Circulating bilirubin, a natural antioxidant, is associated with decreased risk of stroke. However, the nature of the relationship between the two remains unknown. We used a Mendelian randomization analysis to assess the causal effect of serum bilirubin on stroke risk in Koreans. METHODS The 14 single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) (<10-7) including rs6742078 of uridin...

Mendelian randomization: genetic anchors for causal inference in epidemiological studies

Observational epidemiological studies are prone to confounding, reverse causation and various biases and have generated findings that have proved to be unreliable indicators of the causal effects of modifiable exposures on disease outcomes. Mendelian randomization (MR) is a method that utilizes genetic variants that are robustly associated with such modifiable exposures to generate more reliabl...