Gentilissimi/e,
vi invio un avviso di seminario, con preghiera di massima diffusione.
Sede del seminario: Istituti Biologici 2, Università di Verona, strada Le
Grazie 8 (VERONA).
Distinti saluti,
Alessandro Marcon
Alessandro Marcon, PhD
Unit of Epidemiology & Medical Statistics
Department of Diagnostics and Public Health
University of Verona
Strada Le Grazie 8, 37134 Verona, Italy
tel. +39 045 8027668
Avviso di SEMINARIO
Lunedì 12 ottobre 2015 ore 11.00-11.45
Aula Igiene & Statistica
(Istituti Biologici 2, blocco B, secondo piano)
Dr. Cosetta Minelli
Senior Lecturer in Medical Statistics, National Heart and Lung Institute,
Imperial College London
*Mendelian randomization: *
*The use of genes as instruments to strengthen causal inference in
epidemiology*
Mendelian randomization is an approach that uses genes as instrumental
variables to derive unconfounded estimates of the effects of risk factors
(e.g. biomarkers) on disease traits, and is therefore increasingly being
used in epidemiology to distinguish causal from spurious associations.
Since genes are randomly allocated at conception, genetic effects on a
biomarker cannot be affected by classical confounding (e.g. lifestyle
factors) or reverse causation (e.g. biomarker level being influenced by the
presence of disease). Demonstration that a genetic variant known to modify
the biomarker also modifies the disease trait represents indirect evidence
of a causal biomarker-disease association. The validity of Mendelian
Randomization, however, is based on instrumental variable assumptions, the
most important being absence of pleiotropy. This talk will describe the
approach, discuss ways to assess pleiotropy, highlight opportunities and
challenges offered by available genome-wide data, and discuss its extension
to the field of epigenetics (two-step epigenetic Mendelian randomization).