- L X Meng: School of Public Health, Shanxi Medical University, Taiyuan 030001, China.
To assess the casual effect of childhood obesity on adulthood coronary artery disease (CAD) using Mendelian randomization (MR) method. Data on BMI of children aged 2-10 years in 2015 were downloaded from Early Growth Genetics Consortium and Genetic Investigation of Anthropometric Traits Consortium. Twenty-seven genetic variants related to children's BMI were selected as instrumental variables (IVs), and the associations between IVs and CAD were extracted from a Meta-analysis of the genome-wide association study of CAD cases published in UK Biobank 2015. We used MR-Egger regression to test whether there was the pleiotropy of the selected SNPs. In the present MR methods, we conducted MR analyses by using mode-based estimate method as primary method for summary-level of associations to estimate the causal association between childhood obesity and CAD. The intercept term estimated for CAD from MR-Egger method suggested that the selected SNPs don't exert pleiotropy with a 95 including the null (-0.008-0.018). In addition, we found evidence that support the effect of childhood obesity on CAD risk: a 1 increase in children BMI (kg/m(2)), and the risk of suffering from CAD in adulthood increased by an average of 37 (=1.37, 95: 1.09-1.72). This study provides a causal association between childhood obesity and CAD risk.