Mendelian Randomization

Mendelian randomization borrows statistical techniques from economics to allow researchers to analyze the effects of the environment, drug treatments, and other factors on human biology and disease. Taking advantage of the fact that genetic variation is randomized among children from the same parent...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inCold Spring Harbor perspectives in medicine Vol. 12; no. 4; p. a041302
Main Author Birney, Ewan
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published United States Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press 01.04.2022
Subjects
Cardiovascular Diseases - genetics
Child
Genetic Variation
Humans
Mendelian Randomization Analysis - methods
Primer
Risk Factors
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Summary:Mendelian randomization borrows statistical techniques from economics to allow researchers to analyze the effects of the environment, drug treatments, and other factors on human biology and disease. Taking advantage of the fact that genetic variation is randomized among children from the same parents, it allows genetic variants known to influence factors like alcohol consumption or low-density lipoprotein (LDL) levels to be used as instrumental variables that can disentangle the effects of these factors on outcomes such as pregnancy or cardiovascular disease, respectively. There are caveats to analyses using Mendelian randomization and related techniques that researchers should be aware of, but they are increasingly powerful tools for solving problems in epidemiology and human biology.
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ISSN:2157-1422
2472-5412
DOI:10.1101/cshperspect.a041302