Causal relationship between Alzheimer's disease and prostate cancer: a bidirectional Mendelian randomization analysis.

BACKGROUND: Previous observational researchers have found an inverse bidirectional link between Alzheimer's disease (AD) and prostate cancer (PCa); yet, the causative nature of this link remains unclear. To investigate the causal interactions between AD and PCa, a bidirectional Mendelian randomization (MR) analysis was conducted.

METHODS: This study comprised two Genome-Wide Association Study (GWAS) summary statistics for AD (17,008 cases and 37,154 controls) and PCa (79,148 cases and 61,106 controls) in individuals of European ancestry. The inverse-variance weighted (IVW) method was employed as the primary approach, while MR-Egger, weighted median, weighted mode, and simple mode served as supplementary methods for estimating the causal effect. To assess pleiotropy, the MR-PRESSO global test and MR-Egger regression were used. Cochran's Q test was adopted to check heterogeneity, MR Steiger test and the leave-one-out analysis was performed to confirm the robustness and reliability of the results.

RESULTS: The causal association genetically inferred of AD on PCa was found using IVW (OR = 0.974, 95% CI = 0.958-0.991, p = 0.003) in forward MR analysis and the causal association genetically inferred of PCa on AD was not found using IVW (OR = 1.000, 95% CI: 0.954-1.049, P = 0.988) in reverse MR analysis. The sensitivity analysis showed that no pleiotropy and heterogeneity was observed. The leave-one-out analysis showed that the findings were not inordinately affected by any instrumental variables.

CONCLUSION: The results of this study demonstrated an absence of bidirectional causality between AD and PCa among the European population, suggested that a genetically predicted possibility of decreased PCa risk in AD patients, and no significant genetically predicted causal effect of PCa on AD.