Studying individual risk factors for self-harm in the UK Biobank: A polygenic scoring and Mendelian randomisation study
This is one of my PhD data science project. I used UK Biobank, a huge dataset with ~250K individuals in my research to study the aetiology of self-harm using genetic causal inference methods.
R and bash scripts used for this project can be found here.
We investigated 24 potential individual risk factors for self-harm, using their polygenic score as an index for genetic risks. Out of these 24 risk factors, major depressive disorder, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder and schizophrenia appeared to be the most plausible causal risk factors for self-harm. No difference emerged between risk factors for non-suicidal and suicidal self-harm.