18–21 May 2026
Europe/Warsaw timezone

Inferring the causal effect direction in genetic association studies: An application to broad depression, obesity, and asthma

20 May 2026, 10:45
18m
Room 12

Room 12

oral presentation Methods in epidemiology 1

Speaker

Sharon Lutz (Harvard Medical School)

Description

In genetic association studies, Mendelian Randomization (MR) is a popular tool for inferring causal relationships between traits using genetic variants as instrumental variables. Recent methods have been proposed as tools that can infer the causal direction between two phenotypes including MR Steiger, bidirectional MR, causal direction-ratio, causal direction-Egger, and causal direction-GLS. We conducted a comprehensive simulation study evaluating type I error control and power of these 19 summary-data-based MR approaches to correctly determine the effect direction in the presence of pleiotropy, measurement error, unmeasured confounding, and weak instrument variables. In addition, we examined the performance of these approaches when there is a longitudinal causal relationship between the two phenotypes. We also applied these 19 methods to the UK biobank to determine the effect direction between body mass index (BMI) and major depressive disorder (MDD) and BMI and asthma.

53573515426

Author

Sharon Lutz (Harvard Medical School)

Co-author

Christoph Lange (Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health)

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