Link to a great talk by @mendelrandom.bsky.social presenting new work that finds no effect.

How strong is the evidence that live shingles vaccination prevents the risk of dementia? A talk yesterday @oxprimarycare.bsky.social on this available here youtu.be/qlTnnQytOJ0

🤣 🤣 🤣

Much interest (and hope) invested in whether shingles vaccination can reduce dementia risk, but what does the evidence actually show? I'll be presenting some new analyses virtually (and in person in Oxford) at 12.15pm UK time 17th July (free registration) events.ox.ac.uk/oxford_event...

Missed this nice commentary from @gushamilton.bsky.social and @mendelrandom.bsky.social - lots of food for thought for someone thinking of dipping their toe into some infection genetic epi ...

.... although in truth when there isn't a photographer about some of us push our bikes slowly up the hills ...

Should be good. It seems that July will be randomisation month this year. rss.org.uk/training-eve... 100 years ago Fisher wrote this: repository.rothamsted.ac.uk/id/eprint/20...

If you're interested in the history and philosophy of randomization in all its forms I'm co-organising a *FREE* conference in glorious Bristol 2-3rd July wth the legendary Samir Okasha, registration is here www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/randomizat... If you think it looks interesting please advertise

Yet another spurious non-linear Mendelian randomization paper has been retracted by a journal academic.oup.com/jpubhealth/a... Kudos to the editors of the Journal of Public Health for following through and retracting spurious publications. What is shocking is that many other journals /cont

G-EE A very much needed (and brilliant) reflection for Mendelian randomization

Have seen thousands of Velvets covers and also saw the Velvet Underground be their own tribute band on two unforgettable nights at Edinburgh playhouse June 1993, but think Waldo’s Gift at Ritual Union 2026 Bristol got closer to the VU spirit than any others I’ve seen

Blog by Andrew Elmore on the genotype-phenotype map reaource ieureka.blogs.bristol.ac.uk/2026/03/11/g...

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A comprehensive new tool for exploring how genetic variation influences outcomes, of relevance to everything driven by phenotypes, which encapsulates many domains, from how drugs work to how natural selection works ... / cont

Failure to understand that the fundamental principle of Mendelian randomization (MR) is of gene-environment equivalence contributes to the flood of nonsense MR papers that are appearing; Shah Ebrahim, Gib Hemani and I explain why in this short commentary. journals.plos.org/plosmedicine...

🤓There's an open 2 yr postdoc position in my group 🏘️ On interactions between area-level socioeconomic position and environmental factors in weight trajectories in children 📈 Using multilevel models; applying the target trial framework 📆 Apply before April 7th! international.au.dk/about/profil...

Embarrasing correcton required for this - it was intended to say "gene-environment equivalence" not interaction is the fundamental principle of MR ..

Failure to understand that the fundamental principle of Mendelian randomization (MR) is of gene-environment equivalence contributes to the flood of nonsense MR papers that are appearing; Shah Ebrahim, Gib Hemani and I explain why in this short commentary. journals.plos.org/plosmedicine...

Failure to understand that the fundamental principle of Mendelian randomization (MR) is that of gene-environment interaction contributes to the flood of nonsense MR papers that are appearing; Shah Ebrahim, Gib Hemani and I explain why in this short commentary. Responses welcome!

Predictably enough, one of the people funded by Wellcome LEAP's FORM project is James B. Adams brainfoundation.org/brain-invest..., whose work featured in our recent review www.cell.com/neuron/fullt..., and not in a good way. see wellcomeleap.org/form/

We're excited to be recruiting an NIH funded postdoc to work in the Coop lab at UC Davis. We're specifically interested in candidates who are want to work at the intersection of human genetics, GWAS, and population genetics modeling. Please RT

Great opportunity for a post-doc position with the amazing Luisia Zuccolo @humantechnopole.bsky.social Details here careers.humantechnopole.it/job/Postdoc-...

How the processes of recuperation vitiate apparent methodological advances in medical research, from meta-analysis to Mendelian randomization

Brilliant inaugural lecture by Professor Evie Stergiakouli on her career so far, @uob-ieu.bsky.social so lucky to have secured her talents right from its inception. Thx Evie!

“There is nothing that utterly destroys all chance for scientific investigation or any continuous work, like having a Distinguished Guest on your hands” H S Jennings, c1925

Perhaps counterintuitively higher prepubertal BMI is strongly protective against breast cancer in later life

Grace Power, @mendelrandom.bsky.social and others (not me!) takes a plausible causal FX of BMI on breast cancer, and narrow down *when* that effect plays out. They find the effects of later BMI on breast cancer are steeply attenuated when conditioned on early BMI. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Newspaper headlines often share compelling quick fixes for health issues - but often the realities of what causes health conditions is more complex. In this blog post @mendelrandom.bsky.social explains why he encourages scientists to look for ways they might be wrong. www.ukri.org/blog/why-evi...

Even Confuseus has caught up on colliderscopes academic.oup.com/ije/article/... 🤣 @f2harrell.bsky.social @michelnivard.bsky.social

Happy New Year! To start the year, do read this @ukri.org interview with our director @mendelrandom.bsky.social, recipient of the prestigious MRC Millennium Medal. medium.com/@UKRI/why-co...

I know a bit about the past of MR, something about the present, and look forward to discussing whether MR has a future, and if so, how that should look

On a Wensleydale pilgrimage - geographically and back in time - to where and when epidemiology was about fieldwork (or practice) amongst real people in actual populations, and involved literally crossing fields … check out his beautifully written papers as a seasonal treat to yourself …

If you enjoy @michelnivard.bsky.social collider bias posts you might enjoy “why epidemiologists who can maintain eye contact are bad at maths” in here www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zPq...

I'm sure @mendelrandom.bsky.social will be gratified to learn that their ads kept popping up during his outstanding YouTube presentation (congrats on the award, George): www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zPq... If you watch one talk on epidemiology this month, make it this one.

🙏 @greally.bsky.social sadly the ads not part of my efforts to become a 💰YouTuber

I have become mightily interested in the causal effect of “forever chemicals” and plastics on gynecological health. I want to make sure our new menstruation data in ALSPAC and Born in Bradford can be used to research this. Anyone know who’s big in (causal) epidemiology of this sort of exposure?

Abolish it!

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Have you seen George Davey Smith telling him the smoking findings were completely implausible at a seminar in Edinburgh 1994? youtu.be/K9pyS7EGCV8?...

Its notable that some (in this case @mendelrandom.bsky.social (George Davey-Smith)) were on to him while he was alive, video a young GDS confronting Eysenk in a Q&A in 1994 for his data being inconsistent: youtu.be/K9pyS7EGCV8?...

Just heard of the death last month of Joe Byrd of the extraordinary United States of America; this song from 1968 seems timeless www.youtube.com/watch?v=yx0U...

David Blunkett on Radio 4 Today programme saying "if you don't know what bread and dripping is, you don't know about what poverty is" takes me back ~60 years to what was my favourite food (had to be white bread ..), and to remember tripe and onions, heart, offal in general, and other delights

🚨 Rachel Reeves JUST unveiled “the most complex government budget in history.” But without a proper wealth tax we’ll never fix the NHS or fund schools properly. So we HACKED a billboard in her constituency with the real solution: TAX THE F*CKING RICH

Free book starting with how politics could consider happiness as an outcome (without resorting to slapstick)

ALSPAC is known locally as Children of the Nineties, now tagging them @childrenofthe90s.bsky.social

The UKB 1/2 million (of which I am one) are indeed reasonably investigated, but in comparison to the ALSPAC cohort - who were recruited as foetuses and followed up into middle age - what I've had done in UKB is tiny. ALSPAC has 3 generations too. We need both study types! www.bristol.ac.uk/alspac/

“A better NHS is possible”; Starmer’s Labour Party has sadly forgotten this. A better Labour Party is also possible!

“A better NHS is possible”; Starmer’s Labour Party has sadly forgotten this. A better Labour Party is also possible!

New paper on everyone’s favourite topic, QC! We show why you should do genotype-level QC on your WGS data www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... Very real quotes about this paper - “The most exciting, mind-blowing paper of the year!” “On a par with Fisher 1918” “I read it every night. Just so beautiful”