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British Women Heart Health Study

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BWHHS Projects In The Media

Height and Cardiovascular Events

The BWHHS is leading a collaborative Mendelian Randomisation (MR) project that aims to investigate the causal role of height on CVD using a multiple instrument MR approach.

Studies from Europe and the United States have agreed to participate and provide their data/results for this meta-analysis.

Prospective studies with participants of European ancestry with genetic data IBC cardio chip are being used.

Alcohol and Cardiovascular Disease

This Menedlian randomisation meta-analysis of 56 studies investigated the association of alcohol consumption with cardiovascular health.

Cocktail

Researchers used a variant of the alcohol dehydrogenase 1B gene (ADH1B) as an indicator of lower alcohol consumption, as it has been found that carriers of this variant experience unpleasant symptoms that lead to lower levels of alcohol consumption in the long term.

Individuals who were genetically predisposed to consume lower amounts of alcohol were found to have a more favourable cardiovascular profile.

This challenges previous reports from studies that light-to-moderate amounts of alcohol may have a protective effect on cardiovascular health.

The results from this analysis strongly suggest that reducing alcohol consumption is beneficial for cardiovascular health.

To access the free full text of this paper click on the title of publication 5 - 2017.  

Adiposity and Body Fat Distribution

This paper reports the causal associations of adiposity and body fat distribution with coronary heart disease, stroke subtypes and type 2 diabetes.

This was a mendelian randomisation analysis in fourteen prospective studies.

The study looked at central body fat distribution, a measure using waist-to-hip ratio adjusted for body mass index (BMI) as well as general adiposity measured by BMI.

Findings indicate that both measures of adiposity have causal effects on coronary heart disease (CHD) and type 2 diabetes mellitus.

The central adiposity measure was found to be causally related to higher risks of CHD, ischemic stroke as well as other cardiometabolic diseases independently from general adiposity measures.