Causal Relationship Between Inflammatory Proteins and Alzheimer's Disease: A Two-sample Bidirectional Mendelian Randomization Study.

Abstract

Background Studies on Alzheimer's disease(AD) indicate inflammation doesn't just follow but drives neurodegeneration. Protein aggregation in neurodegeneration can trigger neuroinflammation, worsening protein aggregation and neurodegeneration. The aim is to use bidirectional Mendelian Randomization(MR) approach to find the causal link between specific inflammatory proteins and AD, creating new hypotheses for studying AD's pathological mechanisms. Method Independent genetic variants for 91 inflammatory proteins (14,824 individuals) and AD (111,326 clinically diagnosed/'proxy' AD patients and 677,663 controls) were selected as instrumental variables(IVs) from published Genome-wide association studies(GWASs) among individuals of predominantly European ancestry. MR analyses included the IVW method, weighted median estimator, MR-Egger regression, sample mode, weighted mode, and sensitivity analyses of Cochran's Q test, MR-PRESSO, leave-one-out analysis, FDR correction and MR-Egger intercept test. We employed a bidirectional two-sample MR approach to explore the causal relationship between inflammatory proteins and AD. Results Our findings are mainly based on the IVW approach. Our results indicate that elevated levels of TNF-β(OR=0.917, 95%CI=0.862-0.975, P=0.006) and IL-6(OR=0.941, 95%CI=0.899-0.985, P=0.009) are significantly associated with a reduced AD risk, while AD has no impact on the levels of the 91 inflammatory proteins selected in this paper. The results of the sensitivity analyses were robust. Conclusion Elevated levels of TNF-β and IL-6 exert a protective effect against the occurrence of AD.