Cai Qixuan, Xin Zhuoyuan, Zuo Lin, Li Fan, Liu Bin
Key Laboratory of Zoonosis Research, Ministry of Education, College of Basic Medical Science, Jilin University, Changchun, China.
Department of Anesthesiology, China-Japan Union Hospital of Jilin University, Changchun, China.
Front Neurosci. 2018 Sep 12;12:627. doi: 10.3389/fnins.2018.00627. eCollection 2018.
Alzheimer's disease (AD) is the most common neurodegenerative disease. In recent years, multiple pathway analyses of AD genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have been conducted, and provided strong support for immune pathways in AD. Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is a chronic autoimmune disease. It is reported that antirheumatic drugs had protective effect on dementia in RA patients. However, observational studies have reported a controversial inverse relationship between AD and RA. In addition, Mendelian randomization studies have also been performed to evaluate the association of RA with AD. However, these studies reported inconsistent association of RA with AD. Until now, it is still unclear that AD is a causally associated with RA. Here, we performed a Mendelian randomization study to investigate the causal association of AD with RA. We analyzed the large-scale AD GWAS dataset (74,046 individuals) and RA GWAS dataset (58,284 individuals) from the European descent. However, we did not identify any significant association of AD with RA using inverse-variance weighted meta-analysis (IVW), weighted median regression and MR-Egger regression.
阿尔茨海默病（AD）是最常见的神经退行性疾病。近年来，已对AD全基因组关联研究（GWAS）进行了多种途径分析，并为AD中的免疫途径提供了有力支持。类风湿性关节炎（RA）是一种慢性自身免疫性疾病。据报道，抗风湿药物对RA患者的痴呆具有保护作用。然而，观察性研究报告了AD与RA之间存在有争议的反向关系。此外，还进行了孟德尔随机化研究以评估RA与AD的关联。然而，这些研究报告的RA与AD的关联并不一致。到目前为止，AD与RA是否存在因果关系仍不清楚。在此，我们进行了一项孟德尔随机化研究，以调查AD与RA之间的因果关联。我们分析了来自欧洲血统的大规模AD GWAS数据集（74,046人）和RA GWAS数据集（58,284人）。然而，我们使用逆方差加权荟萃分析（IVW）、加权中位数回归和MR-Egger回归未发现AD与RA之间存在任何显著关联。
