Revealing an association between HPV and systemic lupus erythematosus: A bidirectional two‐sample Mendelian randomization study

Abstract

BackgroundAn increasing number of studies have focused on the association between Human papillomavirus (HPV) infection and systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE). However, current evidence is largely based on retrospective studies, which are susceptible to confounding factors and cannot establish causation.MethodsA bidirectional two‐sample Mendelian randomization (MR) design was used to evaluate the causal relationship between HPV and SLE. Mononucleoside polymers (SNPS) with strong evidence for genome‐wide association studies (GWAS) were selected from the HPV exposure dataset and used as an instrumental variable (IV) for this study. For the MR Analysis results, the MR‐Egger intercept P test, MR‐Presso global test, CochranQ test and leave‐one test were used for sensitivity analysis.ResultsBased on the evidence of MR Analysis, this study finally determined that there was no causal association between HPV16 and HPV18 and SLE.ConclusionsPossible regulation of HPV infection is not significantly associated with regulation of SLE. These findings provide new insights into the underlying mechanisms of HPV and SLE and need to be validated by further studies.