Circulating inflammatory cytokines and female reproductive diseases: a Mendelian randomization analysis.
Lin Y., Wang G., Li Y., Yang H., Zhao Y., Liu J., Mu L.
CONTEXT: Extensive studies have provided considerable evidence suggesting the role of inflammation in the development of female reproductive diseases. However, the causality isn't established. OBJECTIVE: To explore whether genetically determined circulating levels of cytokines are causally associated with female reproductive diseases and discover potential novel drug targets for these diseases. METHODS: Instrumental variables (IVs) for 47 circulating cytokines were obtained from a genome-wide association study (GWAS) meta-analysis of 31,112 European individuals. Protein quantitative trait loci and expression quantitative trait loci close to genes served as our IVs. Summary data of nine female reproductive diseases were mainly derived from GWAS meta-analysis of the UK biobank and FinnGen. We elevated the association using the Wald ratio or inverse-variance-weighted Mendelian randomization (MR) with subsequent assessments for MR assumptions in several sensitivity and colocalization analyses. We consider FDR