Benji Woolf

New pre-print "Mendelian randomization in a multi-ancestry world: reflections and practical advice" led by @amymariemason - arxiv.org/abs/2510.17554

@stevesphd @BarWoolf @ERSpublications Really important work (and delighted to help) using pulmonary hypertension as a disease exemplar. Applicable across all rare disease I expect.

New manuscript led by @BarWoolf "A cautionary note on the naive use of general-population biobanks to study pulmonary arterial hypertension" is now published at Euro Respiratory Journal @ERSpublications: pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40967765/. Summary follows:

One of my students @StEdmundsCam has a really remarkable story of overcoming adversity to study @Cambridge_Uni. Sadly his scholarship can't fund the rest of his degree so he is trying crowdfunding. Any help would be really appreciated, thank you very much! gofundme.com/f/from-poverty…

New pre-print online: "Context-stratified Mendelian randomization: exploiting regional exposure variation to explore causal effect heterogeneity and non-linearity", arxiv.org/abs/2507.11088. We propose an alternative approach to assess non-linearity in Mendelian randomization.

@BarWoolf Forgot to add the link to the manuscript: academic.oup.com/ajeadvances/ad….

New paper published at AJE Advances: "The role of estimation in Mendelian randomization: should Mendelian randomization investigations provide estimates?" led by @BarWoolf and myself. Brief thread:

Posting a tad late, but @jamesyrmsk and @dpsg108 and I have a new research letter in @intjepidemiol where we use negative controls to illustrate why drug use phenotypes should not be used as exposures in MR studies academic.oup.com/ije/article/54…

🚨 New preprint awaiting feedback! 🚨 led by the lovely and talented @martaalcalde18 looking at the relationship between PDE5 inhibition and Alzheimer's disease using #mendelianrandomization (spolier: we found nada) medrxiv.org/content/10.110…

And the accepted m/s is now out in the AJE! academic.oup.com/aje/advance-ar… Thank you to @htcronje @dpsg108 @stevesphd @LoukasZagkos @LarssonSC Summary can be found x.com/BarWoolf/statu…

Had a lot of fun presenting our work (accepted this week at the AJE) on exposure miss-identification in MR, and how it results in directionally incorrect conclusions for studies of caffeine consumption at #mrconf24.

youtube.com/watch?v=-8Gy0s… really enjoyed watching this seminar by @HarvardEpi on measurement error. Lots of food for thought.

@gushamilton Thank you Gus :)

@BarWoolf @mark_toshner @stevesphd @dpsg108 Cool work! I keep on meaning to write an SR of all the IL6R MR studies and the corresponding RCTs. I am yet to find one that doesn't match.

Our new study erj.ersjournals.com/content/early/… with James Perry, Charles Hong @mark_toshner, @stevesphd, @dpsg108, Martin Wilkins, and Chris Rhodes failed to find evidence supporting the use of IL6R inhibitors on pulmonary arterial hypertension.

New Mendelian Randomization from @LoukasZagkos @htcronje @BarWoolf @stevesphd @Yuan_AS @LarssonSC @jotzou @dpsg108 et al.: Long-term increases in circulating #caffeine may reduce bodyweight and the risk of osteoarthrosis and osteoarthritis. shorturl.at/blySV

**Flash Talks Event** Benjamin Woolf @BarWoolf shares his research "Comparison of caffeine consumption behavior with plasma caffeine levels as exposure measures in drug-target Mendelian randomization studies" Vote for your favourite talk: meg-uk.org/flash-talks-20…

New paper: "A frequentist test of proportional colocalization after selecting relevant genetic variants": arxiv.org/abs/2402.12171 led by Ash Patel. We introduce a new test for colocalization in a frequentist paradigm. Thread follows!

@stevesphd Is the latter 'prop-coloc-cond' meant to be 'prop-coloc-full' or should I have gone to bed a few hours ago?

We introduce two flavours of prop-coloc: prop-coloc-cond looks at lead variants only, accounting for uncertainty in selection; prop-coloc-cond looks at the top 10 variants (rejects colocalization more often, but can be sensitive to secondary signals).

Really nice review by @htcronje and @stevesphd on the importance of sensible variant selection in MR

@AlexTISYoung @stevesphd Interesting. My expectation would be that PDE5 inhib. has some other negative consequences e.g. (not sure if any one else has written about this or if it is only me) I've found it much harder to stay warm since being prescribed them. Betas size is due to scaling to a large dose

@stevesphd @BarWoolf @bmj_latest Since this is quite a large effect on number of children, shouldn't we expect to see strong selection on mutations that inhibit PDE5? (Unless PDE5 inhibition has other negative fitness consequences.)

Do biological mechanisms leading to penis stiffening make men happy? Do they make them more fertile? Find out in our new drug target Mendelian randomization article, led by @BarWoolf and now out at @bmj_latest: bmj.com/content/383/bm…