Publication type
Conference Paper
Series
Understanding Society Scientific Conference 2015, 21-23 July 2015, University of Essex, Colchester, UK
Author
Publication date
July 22, 2015
Summary
Observational evidence suggests that there is a possible bidirectional association between obesity and sleep. An important limitation of observational analysis is the ability to infer causation and overcome reverse causality. Mendelian Randomization (MR) is a technique, which seeks to overcome this hurdle by using genetic variants identified from the Genome Wide Association Study (GWAS) literature as instruments for the exposure of interest and test whether there is a causal association with the outcome of interest. Here we implement the MR method to examine whether body mass index (BMI) is causally associated with sleep duration using pooled data from a number of studies, including the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing (ELSA), the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children and Understanding Society. Observational analyses using linear regression confirms an association such that there is a negative relationship between BMI and sleep duration: b=-0.010 (95% CI= -0.019 – -0.005), N=4639, in ELSA, b=-0.010 (95% CI=-0.015 – -0.005), N=14981, in Understanding Society, after adjustment for a wide range of covariates. We will examine whether the observation of BMI and poor sleep duration is causal by employing Mendelian Randomization using a genetic score for BMI created from 92 single-nucleotide polymorphisms recently identified in GWAS publications. Results from the Mendelian Randomization will be presented.
Subjects
Link
Cid:523220