Causality of occupational exposure on rheumatoid arthritis and ankylosing spondylitis: a two-sample mendelian randomization study

Abstract

Objective: This study aimed to explore the potential causal link between three specific types of occupational exposure on rheumatoid arthritis (RA) and ankylosing spondylitis (AS).

Method: A Two-sample Mendelian randomization (TSMR) analysis, comprising univariate MR (UVMR) and multivariate MR (MVMR) analyses, was performed to investigate the potential causal association between three types of occupational exposures, jobs involving mainly walking or standing (JWS), jobs involving heavy manual or physical work (JMP), and jobs involving shift work(JSW) on RA and AS. Genetic variants for genome-wide association studies (GWAS) of occupational exposure and AS were obtained from the UK Biobank. GWAS summary data for RA were obtained from FinnGen Biobank analysis. For UVMR, six methods of Inverse Variance Weighted (IVW), MR-Egger, Weighted Mode, Weighted Median, Simple Mode, MR pleiotropy residual sum, and outlier (MR-PRESSO) were used for the analysis. The MVMR was analyzed using the IVW model as well as the MR-Egger model.

Results: The UVMR suggested no causal relationship between the three occupational exposure and RA [IVW: P=0.59,0.21,0.63] or AS [IVW: P=0.43,0.57,0.04], as did the bidirectional MR [IVW: P=0.73,0.70,0.16], [IVW: P=0.65,0.68,0.74]. Although unadjusted MVMR suggested a causal relationship between JMP and AS [IVW: OR = 1.01, 95% CI = 1.00- 1.02, p = 0.02], the adjusted MVMR denied this relationship and concluded that there was no causal relationship between the other occupational exposure and either RA or AS.

Conclusion: Our MR analysis did not establish a direct causal relationship between certain occupational exposures and either RA or AS.

Keywords: Mendelian randomization; ankylosing spondylitis; occupational exposure; rheumatism; rheumatoid arthritis.