Department of Burns, Nanfang Hospital, Southern Medical University, Guangzhou, China.
National Clinical Research Center for Metabolic Diseases, Key Laboratory of Diabetes Immunology (Central South University), Ministry of Education, and Department of Metabolism and Endocrinology, The Second Xiangya Hospital of Central South University, Changsha, Hunan, China.
Front Immunol. 2023 Jan 30;13:1072573. doi: 10.3389/fimmu.2022.1072573. eCollection 2022.
The most commonly acknowledged non-scarring alopecia are androgenetic alopecia (AGA) and alopecia areata (AA). Previous studies have revealed various risk factors associated with alopecia. However, the relationship between leukocyte telomere length (LTL) and non-scarring alopecia remains unclear.
A two-sample Mendelian randomization (MR) analysis was performed to evaluate the causality between genetically predicted LTL and the risk of non-scarring alopecia. MR analyses were performed using the inverse variance-weighted (IVW) method and complemented with other MR methods.
The summary statistics of the genome-wide association studies (GWAS) for AGA and AA were obtained from the FinnGen biobank, which included 119,185 and 211,428 individuals, respectively. A total of 126 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) with genome-wide significance were selected as the instrumental variables for LTL. The MR analyses suggested a causal relationship between LTL and AGA, and the risk of AGA increased by 3.19 times as the genetically predicted LTL was shortened by one standard deviation in log transformed form under the IVW method (OR = 4.19, 95% CI = 1.20-14.61, = 0.024). The other MR methods also demonstrated a similar trend of the effect of LTL on AGA. There was no causal relationship between LTL and AA ( > 0.05). Sensitivity analyses further demonstrated that the current results were less likely to be affected by confounders and bias.
Our results suggested a potential causal relationship between LTL and AGA, and shortened LTL was associated with an increased risk of AGA.
公认的非瘢痕性脱发主要有雄激素性脱发（AGA）和斑秃（AA）。先前的研究揭示了与脱发相关的各种风险因素。然而，白细胞端粒长度（LTL）与非瘢痕性脱发之间的关系尚不清楚。
进行了两样本孟德尔随机化（MR）分析，以评估遗传预测的 LTL 与非瘢痕性脱发风险之间的因果关系。使用逆方差加权（IVW）法进行 MR 分析，并辅以其他 MR 方法。
AGA 和 AA 的全基因组关联研究（GWAS）的汇总统计数据来自芬兰基因生物库，分别包含 119185 人和 211428 人。选择 126 个具有全基因组意义的单核苷酸多态性（SNP）作为 LTL 的工具变量。MR 分析表明 LTL 与 AGA 之间存在因果关系，在 IVW 方法下，LTL 每缩短一个标准差（log 转换形式），AGA 的风险增加 3.19 倍（OR=4.19，95%CI=1.20-14.61，=0.024）。其他 MR 方法也表明了 LTL 对 AGA 影响的类似趋势。LTL 与 AA 之间没有因果关系（>0.05）。敏感性分析进一步表明，当前结果不太可能受到混杂因素和偏差的影响。
我们的研究结果表明 LTL 与 AGA 之间存在潜在的因果关系，LTL 缩短与 AGA 风险增加相关。
