Utilising offspring genotype by proxy Mendelian randomization to investigate the causal effect of offspring traits on parental health

Offspring can exert profound effects on the health of their parents. This is perhaps most apparent during the perinatal period, where the fetus influences processes that alter pre- and post-natal maternal physiology. In theory, it is possible to investigate the causal effect of offspring traits on parental health outcomes using Mendelian randomisation (MR), however, as parental and offspring genotypes are correlated, analyses need to be adjusted for the parent’s genotype to avoid confounding through the parental genome. Such analyses are difficult to perform at scale because of the paucity of cohorts across the world with large numbers of genotyped maternal- or paternal-offspring dyads and parent-offspring trios. In this manuscript, we explain how the causal effects of offspring traits on parental health outcomes can be investigated using Mendelian randomization (MR) and discuss the challenges in implementing such designs. We introduce the “offspring genotype by proxy” MR framework which can be employed in the absence of offspring genetic information to complement existing approaches in the triangulation of causal inference. The basic idea is to use parental genotypes to proxy the direct effect of their offspring’s genotype on their offspring’s own exposures. Specifically, we show how it is possible to proxy offspring genotype with paternal genotype when investigating causal effects of offspring traits on maternal health outcomes (and vice versa for paternal outcomes), which minimises the problem of confounding from the relevant parents’ genotype. We compare our framework to other MR designs that might be used to explore effects of offspring traits on parental health and investigate the consequences of model misspecification and spousal misclassification on statistical power and consistency. Given the increasing availability of datasets like the UK Biobank that (incidentally) include tens of thousands of genome-wide genotyped spousal pairs as well as large population based biobanks with linked health record data for first-degree relatives, we conclude that the offspring genotype by proxy MR approach could augment causal analyses of offspring exposures on their parents’ outcomes as implementation is not restricted to datasets with parent-offspring genotype information.