Research paper
Richmond RC, Wade KH, Corbin L, Bowden J, Hemani G, Timpson NJ, Davey Smith G. Investigating the role of insulin in increased adiposity: Bi-directional Mendelian randomization study. bioRxiv [preprint]. Posted 2017 Jun 28. doi:10.1101/155739
Why we cite it
A two-sample, bidirectional Mendelian randomization of BMI and fasting insulin, using published genome-wide summary results. Its headline finding runs from adiposity to insulin, not the other way. It also limits its own reach: the insulin instrument was weak, the insulin-variant estimates were highly heterogeneous, and the authors note they tested fasting insulin only, leaving “insulin response” open. That last point is the exposure Astley et al. 2018 argue is the right one. So the two papers’ disagreement is narrower than “opposite result” suggests.
Known defects on this page:
- Most reference pages are missing their About the authors section Most of our reference pages leave out the section about who wrote the paper