Associations between Disc Hemorrhage and Primary Open-Angle Glaucoma Based on Genome-Wide Association and Mendelian Randomization Analyses.

We aimed to investigate the genetic loci related to disc hemorrhage (DH) and the relationship of causation between DH and primary open-angle glaucoma (POAG) using a genome-wide association study (GWAS) in East Asian individuals. The GWAS included 8488 Koreans who underwent ocular examination including fundus photography to determine the presence of DH and POAG. We performed a GWAS to identify significant single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) associated with DH and analyzed the heritability of DH and genetic correlation between DH and POAG. The identified SNPs were utilized as instrumental variables (IVs) for two-sample Mendelian randomization (MR) analysis. The POAG outcome dataset was adopted from Biobank Japan data (n = 179,351). We found that the rs62463744 (;), rs11658281 (), and rs77127203 (;) SNPs were associated with DH. The SNP heritability of DH was estimated to be 6.7%, with an absence of a genetic correlation with POAG. MR analysis did not reveal a causal association between DH and POAG for East Asian individuals. The novel loci underlying DH in the Korean cohort revealed SNPs in the , , and genes. The absence of a causal association between DH and POAG implies that DH is a shared risk factor, rather than an independent culprit factor, and warrants further investigation.