geoffrey modest medical blogs

  a recent article assessed long-term vascular risk factors associated with future incident dementia, quantifying the early presence of hypertension, diabetes, and smoking to the subsequent development of dementia both before and after age 80, taking into account apolipoprotein ε4, and calculating the population attributable fractions (PAFs) for these risk factors individually and in combination: see   dementia early risk for later dementia JamaNeuro2025  in dropbox or doi:10.1001/jamaneurol.2025.1495 Details : -- 7731 participants in the Atherosclerosis Risk and Communities (ARIC) study with 33 years of follow-up from 1987 to 2020, in the current ARIC-NCS study (ARIC-Neurocognitive Study)     -- this study included participants from Jackson, Mississippi; Forsyth County, North Carolina; Minneapolis suburbs, Minnesota; and Washington County, Maryland     -- these sites reflected significant diversity in terms of socioeconomic factors, including rac...

A large-scale study using mendelian randomization analysis found that there was no protective effect from even small amounts of alcohol on cardiovascular disease (see  alcohol intake cardiovasc mendelian random JAMA2022  in dropbox, or  doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2022.3849). Many thanks to Tim Naimi for his input on this....     --  mendelian randomization (MR) basically uses specific genetic variations called single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) that are strongly associated with a specific behavior (eg alcohol consumption), with the assumption that these SNPs/genetic variations are randomly represented in the population, to see if there is a causal effect on an outcome (cardiovascular diseases) from observational data.          -- so, this technique represents a relatively easy-to-do analysis, sort of "randomized controlled trial" (since these SNPs are assumed to be randomly represented in the population), an...