PLoS medicine
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In this Perspective, Alberto Ascherio and Kassandra Munger discuss the implications of Richards and colleagues' study exploring the role of early-life obesity in risk of multiple sclerosis.
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Observational studies have reported an association between obesity, as measured by elevated body mass index (BMI), in early adulthood and risk of multiple sclerosis (MS). However, bias potentially introduced by confounding and reverse causation may have influenced these findings. Therefore, we elected to perform Mendelian randomization (MR) analyses to evaluate whether genetically increased BMI is associated with an increased risk of MS. ⋯ Genetically elevated BMI is associated with risk of MS, providing evidence for a causal role for obesity in MS etiology. While obesity has been associated with many late-life outcomes, these findings suggest an important consequence of childhood and/or early adulthood obesity.
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This article was republished on May 19th, 2016 to correct poor figure quality in the PDF version, which was introduced during the typesetting process. [This corrects the article DOI: 10.1371/journal.pmed.1001998.].