Assessing the causal role of body mass index on cardiovascular health in young adults: Mendelian randomization and recall-by-genotype analyses.

Conclusions: Complementary MR and RbG causal methodologies, together with a range of sensitivity analyses, suggest that higher BMI is likely to cause worse cardiovascular health, specifically higher BP and LVMI, even in youth. Higher BMI also resulted in increased CO in the RbG study, which appeared to be solely driven by SV, as neither MR nor RbG analyses suggested a causal effect of BMI on heart rate. These consistent results support efforts to reduce BMI from a young age to prevent later adverse cardiovascular health and illustrate the potential for phenotypic resolution with maintained analytical power using RbG.
PMID: 30524135 [PubMed - in process]

Source: Circulation - November 13, 2018 Category: Cardiology Authors: Wade KH, Chiesa ST, Hughes AD, Chaturvedi N, Charakida M, Rapala A, Muthurangu V, Khan T, Finer N, Sattar N, Howe LD, Fraser A, Lawlor DA, Davey Smith G, Deanfield JE, Timpson NJ Tags: Circulation Source Type: research