The association between vitamin D and uterine fibroids: A mendelian randomization study

Weijie Guo; Mengyuan Dai; Zhuoling Zhong; San Zhu; Guidong Gong; Mei Chen; Junling Guo; Yaoyao Zhang

doi:10.3389/fgene.2022.1013192

The association between vitamin D and uterine fibroids: A mendelian randomization study

Front Genet. 2022 Sep 21:13:1013192. doi: 10.3389/fgene.2022.1013192. eCollection 2022.

Authors

Weijie Guo^{1

2}, Mengyuan Dai^{1

2}, Zhuoling Zhong^{1

2}, San Zhu², Guidong Gong¹, Mei Chen¹, Junling Guo^{1

3}, Yaoyao Zhang^{1

2}

Affiliations

¹ Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology of West China Second University Hospital, BMI Center for Biomass Materials and Nanointerfaces, College of Biomass Science and Engineering, Sichuan University, Chengdu, Sichuan, China.
² Key Laboratory of Birth Defects and Related of Women and Children of Ministry of Education, West China Second University Hospital, Sichuan University, Chengdu, China.
³ State Key Laboratory of Polymer Materials Engineering, Sichuan University, Chengdu, Sichuan, China.

Abstract

Uterine fibroids (UFs), the most common benign gynecological tumor, can bring severe negative impacts on a woman's life quality. Vitamin D, is thought to play an important role in regulating cell proliferation and differentiation. In recent years, several studies suggested that higher level of vitamin D has a negative effect on the occurrence of UFs, but the results of studies on the relationship between them are conflicting and further evidence needs to be studied. Here in, we used a two-sample Mendelian Randomization (2SMR) study to explore the causal relationship between genetically predicted vitamin D levels and the risk of UFs. The exposure data comes from a genome-wide association study (GWAS) summary dataset consisting of 441,291 individuals, which includes datasets from United Kingdom Biobank, FinnGen Biobank and the corresponding consortia. Single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) associated with vitamin D at a significant level of p < 5 × 10^-8 and low linkage disequilibrium (LD) level (r² < 0.01) were selected. The outcome data comes from a GWAS dataset of IEU analysis of United Kingdom Biobank phenotypes consisting of 7,122 UFs cases and 455,811 controls. Our inverse-variance weight (IVW) analysis results support the causal association of genetically predicted vitamin D with the risk of UFs (OR = 0.995,95% CI = 0.990-0.999, p = 0.024). In addition, heterogeneity and pleiotropy were not observed in statistical models. In summary, our results indicate that elevated serum vitamin D levels are in strong relationship with reduction of the risk of UFs, which indicates that the clinical treatment of UFs may have a new and excellent option.

Keywords: GWAS; SNP; mendelian randomization; uterine fibroids; vitamin D.

Abstract

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