(1) Background: Ovarian cancer (OC) and Parkinson’s disease (PD) represent a huge public health burden. The relationship of these two diseases is suggested in the literature while not fully understood. To better understand this relationship, we conducted a bidirectional Mendelian ran-domization analysis using genetic markers as a proxy. (2) Methods: Utilizing single nucleotide polymorphisms associated with PD risk, we assessed the association between genetically predicted PD and OC risk, overall and by histotypes, using summary statistics from previously conducted genome-wide association studies of OC within the Ovarian Cancer Association Consortium. Similarly, we assessed the association between genetically predicted OC and PD risk. The inverse variance weighted method was used as the main method to estimate odds ratios (OR) and 95% confidence intervals (CI) for the associations of interest. (3) Results: There was no significant association between genetically predicted PD and OC risk: OR = 0.95 (95% CI: 0.88–1.03), or between genetically predicted OC and PD risk: OR = 0.80 (95% CI: 0.61–1.06). On the other hand, when examined by histotypes, a suggestive inverse association was observed between genetically predicted high grade serous OC and PD risk: OR = 0.91 (95% CI: 0.84–0.99). (4) Conclusions: Overall, our study did not observe a strong genetic association between PD and OC, but the observed potential association between high grade serous OC and reduced PD risk warrants further investigation.
Background: Observational studies have linked various exposures
to ovarian cancer (OC) risk, but the findings are potential subject to
reverse causation and confounding. Herein, we performed comprehensive
Mendelian randomization (MR) analyses to systematicly evaluate potential
causal associations of known and suspected influencing factors with risk
of OC and six common histotypes. Methods: Two-sample MR
analyses were applied to data from the genome wide association study
summary results comprising a total of 25,509 women with epithelial OC
and 40,941 controls of European descent in the Ovarian Cancer
Association Consortium. Genetic instrumental variables associated with
influencing factors were selected. Inverse-variance weighted method was
used as the primary analysis, and the MR assumptions were evaluated in
sensitivity analyses. MR-PRESSO method was applied for the detection and
correction of potential horizontal pleiotropy. Results: OC and
six histotypes were considered in this study. Of 100 known and suspected
influencing factors, 7 lifestyle factors, 12 dietary factors, 4
reproductive factors, 12 body size factors, 3 comobidities, and 7
biomarkers were significantly associated with risk of OC. Among them,
26, 9, 25, 19, 5, 13, and 22 factors were associated with the risk of
OC, clear cell OC, endometrioid OC, high grade serous OC, low grade
serous OC, mucinous OC, and low malignant potential OC respectively.
Conclusion: Our study adds to current knowledge on the causal
effect of known and suspected influencing factors on OC and six
histotypes. Further investigation is needed to better understand
potential pathways or mechanisms of these factors.
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