Student or educator? Sign up with your school email and get 6 months of Pro free.
Cited by 319

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 59 of the 59 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

Understanding the consequences of education inequality on cardiovascular disease: mendelian randomisation study

Open access
Carter, Alice R, Gill, Dipender, Davies, Neil M, Taylor, Amy E, Tillmann, Taavi, Vaucher, Julien, Wootton, Robyn E, Munafò, Marcus R, Hemani, Gibran, Malik, Rainer, Seshadri, Sudha, Woo, Daniel, Burgess, Stephen, Davey Smith, George, Holmes, Michael V, Tzoulaki, Ioanna, Howe, Laura D, Dehghan, Abbas·2019·BMJ

Abstract

Objectives: To investigate the role of body mass index (BMI), systolic blood pressure, and smoking behaviour in explaining the effect of education on the risk of cardiovascular disease outcomes. Design: Mendelian randomisation study. Setting: UK Biobank and international genome-wide association study data. Participants: Predominantly participants of European ancestry. Exposure: Educational attainment, BMI, systolic blood pressure, and smoking behaviour in observational analysis, and randomly allocated genetic variants to instrument these traits in mendelian randomisation. Main outcomes measure: The risk of coronary heart disease, stroke, myocardial infarction, and cardiovascular disease (all subtypes; all measured in odds ratio), and the degree to which this is mediated through BMI, systolic blood pressure, and smoking behaviour respectively. Results: Each additional standard deviation of education (3.6 years) was associated with a 13% lower risk of coronary heart disease (odds ratio 0.86, 95% confidence interval 0.84 to 0.89) in observational analysis and a 37% lower risk (0.63, 0.60 to 0.67) in mendelian randomisation analysis. As a proportion of the total risk reduction, BMI was estimated to mediate 15% (95% confidence interval 13% to 17%) and 18% (14% to 23%) in the observational and mendelian randomisation estimates, respectively. Corresponding estimates were 11% (9% to 13%) and 21% (15% to 27%) for systolic blood pressure and 19% (15% to 22%) and 34% (17% to 50%) for smoking behaviour. All three risk factors combined were estimated to mediate 42% (36% to 48%) and 36% (5% to 68%) of the effect of education on coronary heart disease in observational and mendelian randomisation analyses, respectively. Similar results were obtained when investigating the risk of stroke, myocardial infarction, and cardiovascular disease. Conclusions: BMI, systolic blood pressure, and smoking behaviour mediate a substantial proportion of the protective effect of education on the risk of cardiovascular outcomes and intervening on these would lead to reductions in cases of cardiovascular disease attributable to lower levels of education. However, more than half of the protective effect of education remains unexplained and requires further investigation.

Overview

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1136/bmj.l1855

Cites

59 of 59 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Verification

Claims the paper makes

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

The self-check needs the paper’s full text.

Citations

Cites

Show all 59 references

Cited by

See all 319

Metadata

Authors
Carter, A. R., Gill, D., Davies, N. M., Taylor, A. E., Tillmann, T., Vaucher, J., Wootton, R. E., Munafò, M. R., Hemani, G., Malik, R., Seshadri, S., Woo, D., Burgess, S., Davey Smith, G., Holmes, M. V., Tzoulaki, I., Howe, L. D., & Dehghan, A.
Venue
BMJ
Publisher
BMJ
Published
2019-05-22
Volume
365
Pages
l1855
ISSN
  • 1756-1833 (ISSN-L)
  • 0959-8138
OpenAlex
W2946081713
Cited by
319
References
59
FWCI
14.76
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
hybrid

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review

How to cite

Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.

This page
CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Understanding the consequences of education inequality on cardiovascular disease: mendelian randomisation study. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1136/bmj.l1855
The paper
Carter, A. R., Gill, D., Davies, N. M., Taylor, A. E., Tillmann, T., Vaucher, J., Wootton, R. E., Munafò, M. R., Hemani, G., Malik, R., Seshadri, S., Woo, D., Burgess, S., Davey Smith, G., Holmes, M. V., Tzoulaki, I., Howe, L. D., & Dehghan, A. (2019). Understanding the consequences of education inequality on cardiovascular disease: mendelian randomisation study. BMJ. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.l1855

Data sources

Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.

Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.