Code used for analyses in Master's thesis titled 'Molecular pathways of type 2 diabetes in cancer development'.
Mendelian Randomisation is a human genetic technique that enables detection of genetic associations between exposures and outcomes. MR uses genetic variants associated with exposure of interest to test whether the effect of the variants on the exposure is proportional to the effect of the same variant on the outcome. It is essentially a linear regression, where the variants' effect on the outcome is regressed on the variants' effect on the exposure.
Genetic variants associated with type 2 diabetes(T2D) were used to investigate the effect of T2D on breast and prostate cancer. Uncertainty around the role of T2D in cancer development stems from a large degree of inconsistency in the findings of observational studies. Unlike MR, observational studies can suffer from reverse causation, confounding and other biases.