Lectures and seminars SfoEpi Seminar Series in Biostatistics: Dr Krista Fischer

Abstract: As time goes on, the follow-up time in large population-based biobanks (created in the first decade of this century) is increasing, together with the power for survival analysis that aims to identify genomic predictors for lifespan. The first 52000 participants of the Estonian Biobank cohort were recruited in 2002-2010 and more than 4200 deaths were observed in the cohort by June 2017. In the talk, this data is used to discuss some general methodological challenges of biobank-based survival analysis (left-truncation, ways to increase power and computational efficiency for genome-wide analysis, etc).  Also, some interesting results based on the work on the Estonian data as well as international consortia will be presented.  Also, the questions on causality and the potential of Mendelian Randomization methodology for identifying the causal effects on lifespan will be discussed.