Variation of all-cause and cause-specific mortality with body mass index in one million Swedish parent-son pairs: An instrumental variable analysis.

ABSTRACT:

Background

High body mass index (BMI) is associated with mortality, but the pervasive problem of confounding and reverse causality in observational studies limits inference about the direction and magnitude of causal effects. We aimed to obtain estimates of the causal association of BMI with all-cause and cause-specific mortality.

Methods and findings

In a record-linked, intergenerational prospective study from the general population of Sweden, we used two-sample instrumental variable (IV) analysis with data from 996,898 fathers (282,407 deaths) and 1,013,083 mothers (153,043 deaths) and their sons followed up from January 1, 1961, until December 31, 2004. Sons' BMI was used as the instrument for parents' BMI to compute hazard ratios (HRs) for risk of mortality per standard

SUBMITTER: Wade KH 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6688790 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature