Journal article
BMI and Well-being in people of East Asian and European Ancestry: a Mendelian randomisation study
- Abstract:
- Previous studies have linked higher body mass index (BMI) to lower subjective well-being in adult European ancestry populations. However, our understanding of these relationships across different populations is limited. Here, we investigated the association between BMI and well-being in people of (a) East Asian and (b) European ancestry in the China Kadoorie Biobank (CKB) and UK Biobank (UKB), respectively. Mendelian randomisation (MR) methods were used to test the relationship between BMI with (a) health satisfaction and (b) life satisfaction. One-sample MR enabled us to test effects in men and women separately and to test the role of cultural contexts by stratifying our analyses by urban and rural home location in both China and the UK. Further, we implemented a control function method to test the linearity of the BMI-well-being relationship. We found evidence of different associations between BMI and well-being in individuals of East Asian versus European ancestry. For example, a genetically instrumented higher BMI tentatively associated with higher health satisfaction in people of East Asian ancestry, especially in females (ß: 0.041, 95% CI: 0.002, 0.081). In contrast, there was a robust inverse association between higher genetically instrumented BMI and health satisfaction in all European ancestry UKB participants (ß: −0.183, 95% CI: −0.200, −0.165, Pdifference < 1.00E−15). We also showed the importance of considering non-linear relationships in the MR framework by providing evidence of non-linear relationships between BMI and health and life satisfaction. Overall, our study suggests potential setting-specific causality in the relationship between BMI and subjective well-being, with robust differences observed between East Asians and Europeans when considering very similar outcomes. We highlight the importance of (a) considering potential non-linear relationships in causal analyses and (b) testing causal relationships in different populations, as the casual nature of relationships, especially relationships influenced by social processes, may be setting-specific.
- Publication status:
- Published
- Peer review status:
- Peer reviewed
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(Preview, Version of record, pdf, 1.5MB, Terms of use)
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- Publisher copy:
- 10.1038/s41398-023-02539-7
Authors
+ Wellcome Trust
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- Grant:
- 212946/Z/18/Z
- 104085/Z/14/Z
- 202922/Z/16/Z
- 088158/Z/09/Z
- Publisher:
- Springer Nature
- Journal:
- Translational Psychiatry More from this journal
- Volume:
- 13
- Article number:
- 251
- Publication date:
- 2023-07-11
- Acceptance date:
- 2023-06-19
- DOI:
- EISSN:
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2158-3188
- Language:
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English
- Keywords:
- Pubs id:
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1452244
- Local pid:
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pubs:1452244
- Deposit date:
-
2023-06-20
- ARK identifier:
Terms of use
- Copyright holder:
- O’Loughlin et al
- Copyright date:
- 2023
- Rights statement:
- © The Author(s) 2023. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
- Notes:
- Collaborative paper
- Licence:
- CC Attribution (CC BY)
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