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Category: Project

Description: We have previously uncovered a potential causal intrauterine effect for maternal smoking during pregnancy and offspring CHDs using parental negative control analyses. We also found that associations between maternal body mass index (BMI - overweight and obesity) and alcohol consumption might be being driven by residual confounding. Further work using a range of study designs to improve causal inference is warranted to test these exposures. Mendelian randomization (MR) uses genetic variants as instrumental variables to test causal effects in observational data. In the proposed project, we aim to use MR in a one-sample setting using data from three European birth cohorts to explore causal associations of maternal BMI, smoking and alcohol on offspring CHDs.