OxTalks will soon move to the new Halo platform and will become 'Oxford Events.' There will be a need for an OxTalks freeze. This was previously planned for Friday 14th November – a new date will be shared as soon as it is available (full details will be available on the Staff Gateway).
In the meantime, the OxTalks site will remain active and events will continue to be published.
If staff have any questions about the Oxford Events launch, please contact halo@digital.ox.ac.uk
Accurate measurement of the effects of disease status on healthcare costs is important in the pragmatic evaluation of interventions but is complicated by endogeneity bias. Mendelian Randomization, the use of random perturbations in germline genetic variation as instrumental variables, can avoid these limitations. We used Mendelian Randomization to model the causal impact on inpatient hospital costs of liability to six prevalent diseases: asthma, eczema, migraine, coronary heart disease, type 2 diabetes, and major depressive disorder. We identified genetic variants from replicated genome-wide associations studies and estimated their association with inpatient hospital costs on over 300,000 individuals. Liability to coronary heart disease had substantial impacts on costs, but other results were imprecise. There was concordance of findings across varieties of sensitivity analyses, including stratification by sex and methods robust to violations of the exclusion restriction.