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IJE Advance Access published online on September 19, 2007
International Journal of Epidemiology, doi:10.1093/ije/dym186
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Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the International Epidemiological Association © The Author 2007; all rights reserved.

Letter to the Editor

A cautionary note on the use of Mendelian randomization to infer causation in observational epidemiology

Murielle Bochud1,*, Arnaud Chiolero1, Robert C Elston2 and Fred Paccaud1

1Community Prevention Unit, University Institute of Social and Preventive Medicine, Lausanne, Switzerland.
2Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio, USA.

* Corresponding author. Community Prevention Unit, University Institute of Social and Preventive Medicine, Lausanne, Switzerland. E-mail: murielle.bochud@chuv.ch

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The concept of Mendelian randomization when used in the context of association studies refers to the random allocation of alleles at the time of gamete formation. This concept has received a lot of attention in recent years in observational epidemiology for its potential to reduce residual confounding and to protect against reverse causation.1 In brief, the random segregation of alleles at the time of gamete formation is a natural experiment that occurs before the outcome of interest, which protects against falsely reversing the inference about a cause-effect relationship. If a particular genetic variant is strongly . . . [Full Text of this Article]


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