The effect of heavy smoking on retirement risk: A mendelian randomisation analysis Gaggero, Alessio Ajnakina, Olesya Zucchelli, Eugenio Hackett, Ruth A. Smoking Retirement risk Polygenic Risk Scores Background and aims: The extent to which heavy smoking and retirement risk are causally related remains to be determined. To overcome the endogeneity of heavy smoking behaviour, we employed a novel approach by exploiting the genetic predisposition to heavy smoking, as measured with a polygenic risk score (PGS), in a Mendelian Randomisation approach. Methods: 8164 participants (mean age 68.86 years) from the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing had complete data on smoking behaviour, employment and a heavy smoking PGS. Heavy smoking was indexed as smoking at least 20 cigarettes a day. A time-to-event Mendelian Randomization (MR) analysis, using a complementary log–log (cloglog) link function, was employed to model the retirement risk. Results: Our results show that being a heavy smoker significantly increases the risk of retirement (β = 1.324, standard error = 0.622, p < 0.05). Results were robust to a battery of checks and a placebo analysis considering the never-smokers. Conclusions: Overall, our findings support a causal pathway from heavy smoking to earlier retirement. 2024-07-29T10:06:42Z 2024-07-29T10:06:42Z 2024-06-17 journal article A. Gaggero et al. 157 (2024) 108078. [https://doi.org/10.1016/j.addbeh.2024.108078] https://hdl.handle.net/10481/93534 10.1016/j.addbeh.2024.108078 eng http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ open access Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 Internacional Elsevier