Identifying potential causal effects of age at menarche: a Mendelian randomization phenome-wide association study.

ABSTRACT:

Background

Age at menarche has been associated with various health outcomes. We aimed to identify potential causal effects of age at menarche on health-related traits in a hypothesis-free manner.

Methods

We conducted a Mendelian randomization phenome-wide association study (MR-pheWAS) of age at menarche with 17,893 health-related traits in UK Biobank (n = 181,318) using PHESANT. The exposure of interest was the genetic risk score for age at menarche. We conducted a second MR-pheWAS after excluding SNPs associated with BMI from the genetic risk score, to examine whether results might be due to the genetic overlap between age at menarche and BMI. We followed up a subset of health-related traits to investigate MR assumptions and seek replication in independent study populations

SUBMITTER: Magnus MC 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7087394 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature