Given the global situation with reduced travel and face-to-face content, it is not possible to plan an in-person course in the foreseeable future. So, the November 2020 version of the Mendelian randomization course will be delivered remotely via an online learning platform. We are currently working through details of how this will work - please be patient and bear with us [Read more...]

Recently the PhenoScanner webtool has been updated by James Staley and colleagues (in particular Mihir Kamat). A number of factors were improved in the update, including more genetic associations, and the ability to search associations by gene and by risk factor. Another important update is that PhenoScanner can now be called directly from R. Here we present some code demonstrating [Read more...]

The MendelianRandomization R package was recently updated to version v0.2.2. There were some fixes in terms of p-values and confidence intervals (for example, previously p-values were based on a t-distribution regardless of the choice specified by the user). The package can be downloaded from https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/MendelianRandomization/index.html. A paper introducing the package can be found at https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28398548.

In November 2015, we ran our first course on Mendelian randomization based on this book. This was a two-day course in Cambridge, UK, based at the MRC Biostatistics Unit. Details of the course are on the BSU website: http://www.mrc-bsu.cam.ac.uk/training/short-courses/mendelianrandomization-course/. The course was over-subscribed, and generally well received. We will run the course again in 2016; please let us know if you are interesting [Read more...]

I recently made software code for implementing Mendelian randomization analyses available as a GitHub-editable document. The motivation for this is that much of this code is scattered in the appendices of various manuscripts, and is hard to find, hard to edit (when you want to update), and the notation isn't always consistent. Code can be found here, and the associated project is here. [Read more...]

MR Catalogue (http://mrcatalogue.medschl.cam.ac.uk/), a web-based tool for performing genetic look-ups in publicly-available data, was launched today. The tool takes genetic variants (either rsid or chromosome and position) as inputs, and outputs the associations of the variants (batch query is needed for multiple variants) with up to 200 different variables, including disease outcomes and continuous phenotypes. There is an option for a [Read more...]