he aim of this miniproject is to look for relationships between educational attainment and BMI and assess causality between them using Mendelian randomisation. This will involve:

- Generating educational attainment (EA) scores derived from genotypic associations with EA from an independent study (carried out as part of the Social Science Genetics Association Consortium) and genotypic dosage information within ALSPAC data.

- Assessing the performance of a series of genotype based scores of EA in terms of their predictive ability for KS3 SATS results (and IQ) and their performance as potential instruments for EA within Mendelian randomisation frameworks.

- Undertaking both observational assessment and Mendelian randomisation analysis of relationships between EA and child BMI.

- Generating similar genetic scores for BMI (initially derived from the 32 most predictive loci taken from Speliotes et al, 2010) and undertake the same analyses as above, but in a bidirectional manner.

In order to perform these analyses, we will require access to ALSPAC genetic (I already have access via the alspac-shared directory on BlueCrystal) data and a series of key phenotypes outlined in the table earlier in this form.

Reference:

Speliotes et al (2010) Association analyses of 249,796 individuals reveal 18 new loci associated with body mass index. Nature Genetics. 42 (11). pp. 937-948.