The Bennett Institute for Applied Data Science at the Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences is delighted to be hosting two lectures by George Davey Smith at the end of September. The first of these is an academically focused lunchtime lecture, titled Mendelian randomisation: what it was, what it is, and what it should become.

It's open to the research community, though spaces are limited. To guarantee a space please book your seat in advance.

Our blog-post on George's visit has more details, including for his second public lecture later in the evening.

PROGRAMME

Location: Cheng Kar Shun Digital Hub, Jesus College, University of Oxford, OX1 3DW (Entrance on Market Street)

12:30 -13:15 Lecture: Mendelian randomisation: what it was, what it is, and what it should become

13:15 - 14:00 Lunch

ABSTRACT

Mendelian Randomisation (MR) uses the special properties of germline genetic variation to strengthen causal inference regarding how modifiable exposures influence disease outcomes. Few papers were published in the first decade of its 20 year history, but since then there has been an exponential increase, which shows no sign of slowing down. The vast majority of current papers are, at best, uninformative, and at worst, nonsense.

In this talk I will restate the fundamental assumption of MR - that of gene-environment equivalence - and the conditions for causal effect identification and estimation. I will then group the threats under three headings:

Noodles: papers that are prima facie nonsense, generated from easily available two sample MR data and sub–ChatGPT text.
No Nulls: influential early MR findings suggested that some drug targets — such as HDL cholesterol level or C-reactive protein — were unlikely to be important. Null MR studies are now increasingly rarely seen.
Numb Skulls: the simplicity of the MR approach is being obscured by increasingly complex methods, the assumptions of which will be opaque to most readers and most authors of papers implementing them. The first of what should be a series of retractions of papers based on one such method has occurred

The common source of these threats will be discussed, approaches to mitigating them advanced, and some promising future directions introduced.

George Davey Smith: Lunchtime Lecture on Mendelian Randomisation