Background
Patient education has been shown to be beneficial for a variety of diseases. Similarly, observational studies have shown that education contributes to the prevention and treatment of gastroesophageal reflux disease (GORD). However, this relationship is not supported by strong evidence.
Methods
We used publicly available genetic summary data from two large consortia, the Psychiatric Genomics Consortium, with data from 1,271 single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) closely associated with educational attainment (EA), and the UK Biobank, including 41 024 patients with GORD and 410 073 control cases. For Mendelian randomization (MR) analysis, we used the inverse-variance weighted method, weighted median method, MR-Egger regression, MR pleiotropy residual sum, and outlier test to retrieve summary data. Analyses were performed using the ‘Two Sample MR’ package in R.
Results
Our results showed that the potential causal relationship between education and lower risk of GORD was statistically significant (OR 0.979, 95% CI 0.975–0.984, P = 0.002). Similar results were obtained using the methods of weighted median and weighted mode. The sensitivity analysis is consistent with the causal explanation. Longer education tended to be associated with lower body mass index, lower risk of hypertension, lower risk of type 2 diabetes, less cigarettes per day and more alcoholic intake per week.
Conclusions
Our analysis shows that education may have a negative causal effect on GORD, which can be a protective factor for the prevention of GORD.