Lifecourse GWAS Consortium

Acute, chronic, and recurring, adverse health conditions that emerge in later life are often shaped by processes experienced throughout life. Gaining a better understanding of how exposures at different stages in the lifecourse influence health outcomes is critical to developing more effective disease prevention and treatment strategies. This is of key public health importance.

Lifecourse stratified effects are of primary interest for identifying critical periods in Mendelian randomisation (MR). Inherited genetic variants may have different effects on some exposures at different time periods across the lifecourse (within a population). As a result, we are seeking to establish a consortium dedicated to generating and integrating data using an age-stratified genome-wide association studies (GWAS) approach.
To robustly run MR, valid instrumental variables must be employed which require large-scale datasets comprising phenotype and genotype data. By aggregating data from a wide range of cohorts, we will be able to access larger sample sizes without requiring repeated measures. This approach additionally allows us to remain agnostic about the shape of the Gene-by-Age (GxAge) interaction during the analysis stage and enables us to model it in greater detail at the post-meta-analysis stage.

This consortium will allow us to develop a more comprehensive set of instruments for future MR analyses to be better able to estimate the effects of a range of phenotypes at multiple time periods across the lifecourse on later life outcomes.