Our ongoing observational analyses in the UK population have shown an association between maternal anaemia and congenital heart defects in children. We therefore aim to conduct a two-sample Mendelian randomization analysis to examine evidence of a potential causal association.
This proposed research will analyse data on maternal and offspring genotypes, maternal iron status (such as haemoglobin and ferritin concentrations) during pregnancy and offspring congenital heart defects in ALSPAC. The resulting summary statistics on the maternal genetic effects on iron status during pregnancy, the maternal genetic and offspring effects on congenital heart defects will be separately compared and meta-analysed with summary statistics from other genome-wide association studies among European ancestry.