Genetically Predicted Telomere Length and Its Relationship With Alzheimer’s Disease

Frontiers in Genetics

Leihong Lu¹  Zaihong Ma²  Shouhai Wu³  Guangping Yu⁴ 

[1] Linyi People’s Hospital, Linyi, China;Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hospital, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, China;The Second Affiliated Hospital of Guangzhou University of Chinese Medicine, Guangzhou, China;Wuqing Center for Disease Control and Prevention, Tianjin, China;

关键词: telomeres;    Alzheimer’s disease;    Mendelian randomization;    epidemiology;    risk factors;   

DOI  :  10.3389/fgene.2021.595864

来源: DOAJ

【 摘 要 】

Are shorter telomeres causal risk factors for Alzheimer’s disease (AD)? This study aimed to examine if shorter telomeres were causally associated with a higher risk of AD using Mendelian randomization (MR) analysis. Two-sample MR methods were applied to the summary effect sizes and standard errors from a genome-wide association study for AD. Twenty single nucleotide polymorphisms of genome-wide significance were selected as instrumental variables for leukocyte telomere length. The main analyses were performed primarily using the random-effects inverse-variance weighted method and complemented with the other three methods: weighted median approaches, MR-Egger regression, and weighted mode approach. The intercept of MR-Egger regression was used to assess horizontal pleiotropy. We found that longer telomeres were associated with lower risks of AD (odds ratio = 0.79, 95% confidence interval: 0.67, 0.93, P = 0.004). Comparable results were obtained using weighted median approaches, MR-Egger regression, and weighted mode approaches. The intercept of the MR-Egger regression was close to zero. This may show that there was not suggestive of horizontal pleiotropy. Our findings provided additional evidence regarding the putative causal association between shorter telomere length and the higher risk of AD.

【 授权许可】

Unknown