ArticleMolecular psychiatry2021
Educational attainment and drinking behaviors: Mendelian randomization study in UK Biobank.
Article in Molecular psychiatry, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 24 papers, 3 of them syntheses that pooled it.
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Who cites it
24 citing papers in PubMed, 3 syntheses or guidelines pooled it, 41 citations in OpenAlex.
- Shared genetic architectures of educational attainment in East Asian and European populations.Nature human behaviour · 2024Pooled it
- Causal effects of education attainment on oral and oropharyngeal cancer: New evidence from a meta-analysis and Mendelian randomization study.Frontiers in public health · 2023Pooled it
- Using Mendelian randomization analysis to better understand the relationship between mental health and substance use: a systematic review.Psychological medicine · 2021Pooled it
- Article
- Ancestry-specific effects ofmedRxiv : the preprint server for health sciences · 2026Article
- Sex differences in the genetic and causal relationships between depression, smoking, and alcohol use: the role of socioeconomic status.Psychological medicine · 2026Article
- Patterns of behaviors related to modifiable health risk factors among Brazilian older adults: Data from the 2013 and 2019 National Health Surveys.Revista brasileira de epidemiologia = Brazilian journal of epidemiology · 2026Article
- Article
- Association between depression and asthma: insight from observational and genetic evidence.BMC psychiatry · 2025Observational
- Generalized genetic liability to substance use disorders.The Journal of clinical investigation · 2024Review
- The role of lifestyle factors in the association between education and self-reported fibromyalgia: a mediation analysis.BMC women's health · 2024Article
- Tobacco exposure and alcohol drinking prevalence and associations with hypertension in rural southwest China: A cross-sectional study.Tobacco induced diseases · 2024Article
- Significance of an altered lncRNA landscape in schizophrenia and cognition: clues from a case-control association study.European archives of psychiatry and clinical neuroscience · 2023Article
- Analysis of the Influence of Socio-Demographic Variables and Some Nutrition and Lifestyle Habits on Beverage Consumption in the Spanish Population.Foods (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Article
- Article
- Association of educational attainment with esophageal cancer, Barrett's esophagus, and gastroesophageal reflux disease, and the mediating role of modifiable risk factors: A Mendelian randomization study.Frontiers in public health · 2023Article
- The relationship between education attainment and gout, and the mediating role of modifiable risk factors: a Mendelian randomization study.Frontiers in public health · 2023Article
- Article
- Early-life educational attainment, APOE ε4 alleles, and incident dementia risk in late life.GeroScience · 2022Article
- Educational attainment and offspring birth weight: A bidirectional Mendelian randomization study.Frontiers in genetics · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
6 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
Educational attainment has been associated with drinking behaviors in observation studies. We performed Mendelian randomization analysis to determine whether educational attainment causally affected drinking behaviors, including amount of alcohol intakes (in total and various types), drinking frequency, and drinking with or without meals among 334,507 white British participants from the UK Biobank cohort. We found that genetically instrumented higher education (1 additional year) was significantly related to higher total amount of alcohol intake (inverse-variance weighted method (IVW): beta = 0.44, 95% confidence interval (CI) 0.40-0.49, P = 1.57E-93). The causal relations with total amount and frequency of alcohol drinking were more evident among women. In analyses of different types of alcohol, higher educational attainment showed the strongest causal relation with more consumption of red wine (IVW beta = 0.34, 95% CI 0.32-0.36, P = 2.65E-247), followed by white wine/champagne, in a gender-specific manner. An inverse association was found for beer/cider and spirits. In addition, we found that 1 additional year of educational attainment was causally related to higher drinking frequency (IVW beta = 0.54, 95% CI 0.51-0.57, P = 4.87E-230) and a higher likelihood to take alcohol with meals (IVW: odds ratio (OR) = 3.10, 95% CI 2.93-3.29, P = 0.00E + 00). The results indicate causal relations of higher education with intake of more total alcohol especially red wine, and less beer/cider and spirits, more frequent drinking, and drinking with meals, suggesting the importance of improving drinking behaviors, especially among people with higher education.
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