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Approved research

Screening and evaluation of causal relationships of cardiometabolic, psychological, and neurological traits with osteoporosis.

Principal Investigator: Professor Yan Zheng
Approved Research ID: 54294
Approval date: October 2nd 2019

Lay summary

Osteoporosis is associated with chronic cardiometabolic diseases, psychological diseases, and neurological diseases, such as cardiovascular disease, diabetes, hypertension, depression, and Alzheimer's disease. However, whether such associations are due to confounding factors or reverse causality is unclear. Besides, there may be other related traits associated with osteoporosis. We aim to use the data from UK Biobank to screen the cardiometabolic, psychological, and neurological phenotypes which are associated with bone mineral density polygenic risk score and further investigate the causal relationships of osteoporosis with these selected phenotypes by using bi-directional Mendelian randomization analysis. The proposed research will help to find cardiometabolic, psychological and neurological traits which are associated with bone mineral density polygenic risk score, and to understand how osteoporosis and selected traits affect each other using Mendelian randomization analysis which is less susceptible to confounding than observational studies. The results will provide additional insights concerning the bi-directional association between osteoporosis and other traits with corresponding implications for etiology and therapeutics. All UKB participants (~500,000) will be included in this analysis, which is anticipated to take two years to accomplish.