STROBE-MR: Guidelines for strengthening the reporting of Mendelian randomization studies

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1 Medical Research Council Integrative Epidemiology Unit, University of Bristol, Bristol, United Kingdom
2 Population Health Sciences, Bristol Medical School, University of Bristol, Bristol, United Kingdom
3 Section of Nutrition and Metabolism, International Agency for Research on Cancer, Lyon, France
4 Institute of Social and Preventive Medicine, University of Berne, Bern, Switzerland
5 Centre for Infectious Disease Epidemiology and Research, University of Cape Town, Cape Town, South Africa
6 Centre for Primary Care and Public Health, Blizard Institute, Queen Mary University of London, London, United Kingdom
7 School of Public Health, Imperial College London, London, United Kingdom
8 Deputy Editor, JAMA, Chicago, Illinois, United States of America
9 NIHR Bristol Biomedical Research Centre, Bristol, United Kingdom
10 MRC Epidemiology Unit, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom
11 Division of Headache, Department of Neurology, Brigham and Women's Hospital, Boston, Massachusetts, United States of America
12 Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts, United States of America
13 Departments of Medicine, Human Genetics, Epidemiology & Biostatistics, Lady Davis Institute, Jewish General Hospital, McGill University, Montreal, Canada
14 Department of Twin Research and Genetic Epidemiology, King's College London, University of London, London, United Kingdom
15 Department of Epidemiology, Erasmus MC, Rotterdam, The Netherlands
16 Department of Clinical Biochemistry, Rigshospitalet, Copenhagen, Denmark
17 Department of Clinical Medicine, Faculty of Health and Medical Sciences, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark
18 Department of Epidemiology, Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston, Massachusetts, United States of America
19 Department of Psychological Science, University of Bristol, Bristol, United Kingdom
DOI
10.7287/peerj.preprints.27857v1
Published
Accepted
Subject Areas
Genomics, Epidemiology, Public Health
Keywords
reporting guidelines, mendelian randomization, STROBE-MR
Copyright
© 2019 Davey Smith et al.
Licence
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ Preprints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
Cite this article
Davey Smith G, Davies NM, Dimou N, Egger M, Gallo V, Golub R, Higgins JP, Langenberg C, Loder EW, Richards JB, Richmond RC, Skrivankova VW, Swanson SA, Timpson NJ, Tybjaerg-Hansen A, VanderWeele TJ, Woolf BA, Yarmolinsky J. 2019. STROBE-MR: Guidelines for strengthening the reporting of Mendelian randomization studies. PeerJ Preprints 7:e27857v1

Abstract

While the number of studies using Mendelian randomization (MR) methods has grown exponentially in the last decade, the quality of reporting of these studies often has been poor. Similar to other reporting guidelines such as CONSORT (Consolidated Standards of Reporting Trials) for randomised trials and STROBE (STrenghtening the Reporting of Observational studies in Epidemiology) for observational studies in epidemiology, the STROBE-MR working group aims to provide guidance to authors on how to improve reporting of MR studies and help readers, reviewers, and journal editors to evaluate the quality of the presented evidence.

Empirical evidence indicates that many reports of MR studies do not clearly state or examine the various assumptions of MR methods and report insufficient details on the data sources, which makes it hard to evaluate the quality and reliability of the results. The STROBE-MR guidance covers both one sample and two sample MR studies. At present, the draft checklist consists of 20 items, organized into the title and abstract, introduction, methods, results and discussion sections of articles.

As these guidelines aim to reach the entire MR community, we would like to give everyone the opportunity to contribute their comments. The following draft of the STROBE-MR checklist is open for public discussion and all feedback will be taken into account during its next revision. For feedback, please use the comment section below this post on PeerJ Preprints.

We hope the final guidelines will serve the entire community and contribute to improving the reporting of MR studies in the future.

Author Comment

The following draft of the STROBE-MR checklist is open for public discussion and all feedback will be taken into account during its next revision. For feedback, please use the comment section below this post on PeerJ Preprint.