ArticleNature communications2023
Quantifying the causal impact of biological risk factors on healthcare costs.
Article in Nature communications, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 11 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
11 citing papers in PubMed.
- Beyond Single Anthropometric Measures: Integrating Waist Circumference and Body Mass Index to Stratify Obesity-Related Health Risk.Current obesity reports · 2026Review
- Genetic factors and symptom dimensions associated with antidepressant treatment outcomes: clues for new potential therapeutic targets?European archives of psychiatry and clinical neuroscience · 2025Review
- Genetic architectures of childhood maltreatment and causal influence of childhood maltreatment on health outcomes in adulthood.Molecular psychiatry · 2025Article
- Biomarkers of aging: from molecules and surrogates to physiology and function.Physiological reviews · 2025Review
- Association between adolescent obesity and early adulthood healthcare utilization-a two-cohort prospective study.BMC medicine · 2025Article
- Genomics and insurance in the United Kingdom: increasing complexity and emerging challenges.Health economics, policy, and law · 2024Article
- Influence of age and sex on longitudinal metabolic profiles and body weight trajectories in the UK Biobank.International journal of epidemiology · 2024Article
- Projecting the 10-year costs of care and mortality burden of depression until 2032: a Markov modelling study developed from real-world data.The Lancet regional health. Western Pacific · 2024Article
- Genetic evidence of the causal relationship between chronic liver diseases and musculoskeletal disorders.Journal of translational medicine · 2024Article
- Novel subgroups of obesity and their association with outcomes: a data-driven cluster analysis.BMC public health · 2024Article
- Participation bias in the UK Biobank distorts genetic associations and downstream analyses.Nature human behaviour · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
8 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Understanding the causal impact that clinical risk factors have on healthcare-related costs is critical to evaluate healthcare interventions. Here, we used a genetically-informed design, Mendelian Randomization (MR), to infer the causal impact of 15 risk factors on annual total healthcare costs. We calculated healthcare costs for 373,160 participants from the FinnGen Study and replicated our results in 323,774 individuals from the United Kingdom and Netherlands. Robust causal effects were observed for waist circumference (WC), adult body mass index, and systolic blood pressure, in which a standard deviation increase corresponded to 22.78% [95% CI: 18.75-26.95], 13.64% [10.26-17.12], and 13.08% [8.84-17.48] increased healthcare costs, respectively. A lack of causal effects was observed for certain clinically relevant biomarkers, such as albumin, C-reactive protein, and vitamin D. Our results indicated that increased WC is a major contributor to annual total healthcare costs and more attention may be given to WC screening, surveillance, and mitigation.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.