School of Public Health (Shenzhen), Sun Yat-Sen University, Shenzhen, Guangdong, China.
Arthritis Res Ther. 2022 Oct 24;24(1):237. doi: 10.1186/s13075-022-02922-7.
With great interest, we have read the recent article "Age at menarche, age at natural menopause, and risk of rheumatoid arthritis - a Mendelian randomization study" by Zhu et al. While we have a great appreciation for the work conducted by the authors, there are some methodological issues that need to be reconsidered. First, the gender description of the sample for age at first birth in this study is wrong according to the original genome-wide association study. Second, the study exploited sex-specific SNPs for age at menarche (AAM) and age at natural menopause (ANM) but sex-combined effects of the SNPs on rheumatoid arthritis (RA) that possibly lead no evidence for the causation of AAM and ANM on RA. We suggested the author add the possible biases due to the issue in the limitations. With problems mentioned above, we recommend solutions to make this article more perfect.
我们饶有兴致地阅读了 Zhu 等人最近发表的题为“初潮年龄、自然绝经年龄与类风湿关节炎风险：一项孟德尔随机研究”的文章。尽管我们对作者的工作非常赞赏，但仍有一些方法学问题需要重新考虑。首先，根据原始的全基因组关联研究，本研究中初育年龄样本的性别描述是错误的。其次，该研究利用了性别特异性单核苷酸多态性（SNP）来研究初潮年龄（AAM）和自然绝经年龄（ANM），但 SNP 对类风湿关节炎（RA）的性别综合效应可能并不能证明 AAM 和 ANM 对 RA 的因果关系。我们建议作者在局限性部分中添加可能由于这一问题而产生的偏倚。鉴于上述问题，我们建议提出一些解决方案以使这篇文章更加完善。
