Background
The causal relationship between cognitive performance and meniscal injuries is unclear. This study aims to elucidate the genetic causality between cognitive performance and meniscal injuries.
Methods
We conducted a two-sample Mendelian Randomization (MR) analysis utilizing summary-level data from extensive genome-wide association studies. Single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) achieving genome-wide significance (P < 5*10− 8) were employed as instrumental variables for each exposure. The inverse-variance weighted (IVW) method served as the principal statistical technique, complemented by the weighted median, MR-Egger regression, and MR-PRESSO methods for sensitivity analyses, accommodating some of the assumptions inherent in IVs.
Results
Genetically predicted cognitive performance was inversely correlated with the odds of meniscal injuries. However, the MR-Egger regression analysis did not corroborate this association. The inverse-variance weighting (IVW) method yielded a pooled odds ratio(OR) of 0.76 (95% CI 0.66–0.88; P = 2*10− 4) per standard deviation increase in the prevalence of cognitive performance, a finding echoed by the weighted median method(OR:0.81, 95% CI 0.67–0.98; P = 3*10− 2).Additionally, we did not detect pleiotropy of effects in our investigation using the MR-Egger intercept and Cochran’s Q test(P > 0.05). But there is heterogeneity between them (P > 0.05).
Conclusion
This study used MR analysis to analyze and explore the genetic data, which showed that cognitive decline is a risk factor for meniscal injuries, and further studies on the mechanisms of the role between the two are needed in the future.