Blood pressure and kidney disease: chicken or egg (or both)?
Staplin N., Haynes R., Herrington WG.
A recent study supports the concept that reduced kidney function causes higher blood pressure, but it found no evidence of causality in the opposite direction. We describe the method of bidirectional Mendelian randomization that was used to explore the direction of the causal relationship between kidney function and blood pressure, and examine the assumptions required for these analyses to give valid results.