Genetics

This post covers Sun and colleagues' 2024 study in Journal of Translational Medicine, the Mendelian randomization analysis of MS and cortical structure, using IMSGC and ENIGMA data across 138 analyses of all 34 Desikan-Killiany regions. It sets out why the design answers a question observational imaging cannot, why testing the whole atlas makes the global null informative, the six surviving regions and their fit with olfactory, visual and frontal phenomenology in MS, the sensitivity work that removed three of nine initial hits, how to read effect sizes that the authors themselves label suggestive, and the follow-up the study makes designable, including mediation analysis to separate immune mediation from MS susceptibility.