MR-DoC2: Bidirectional Causal Modeling with Instrumental Variables and Data from Relatives Institutional Repository Document uri icon

abstract

  • AbstractEstablishing causality is an essential step towards developing interventions for psychiatric disorders, substance use and many other conditions. While randomized controlled trials (RCTs) are considered the gold standard for causal inference, they are unethical in many scenarios. Mendelian randomization (MR) can be used in such cases, but importantly both RCTs and MR assume unidirectional causality. In this paper, we developed a new model, MRDoC2, that can be used to identify bidirectional causation in the presence of confounding due to both familial and non- familial sources. Our model extends the MRDoC model (Minic et al 2018), by simultaneously including risk scores for each trait. Furthermore, the power to detect causal effects in MRDoC2 does not require the phenotypes to have different additive genetic or shared environmental sources of variance, as is the case in the direction of causation twin model (Heath et al., 1993).

altmetric score

  • 9.65

author list (cited authors)

  • Castro-de-Araujo, L. F., Singh, M., Zhou, Y. i., Vinh, P., Verhulst, B., Dolan, C. V., & Neale, M. C.

citation count

  • 2

complete list of authors

  • Castro-de-Araujo, Luis FS||Singh, Madhurbain||Zhou, Yi||Vinh, Philip||Verhulst, Brad||Dolan, Conor V||Neale, Michael C

Book Title

  • bioRxiv

publication date

  • March 2022