Insulin product decreases risk of varicose vein: Evidence from a Mendelian randomization study

Abstract

CONTEXT: The association between insulin product treatment and risk of varicose vein (VV) is still unknown. AIMS: Our study used two-sample Mendelian randomization (MR) to investigate whether treatment of insulin product was causally associated with a lower risk of VV. SUBJECTS AND METHODS: We searched the summary data from genome-wide association study through MR-Base platform. Data included were from Neale Lab UK-Biobank (UKB)-a-153 (insulin product) and MRC integrative epidemiology unit UKB-b-15592 (VV surgery). Three MR approaches, including inverse variance weighted (IVW) method, MR-Egger, and weighted median method were used to explore the casual effect of insulin product on VV. The exposure in our study was insulin product, and the outcome was VV surgery, both measured by single nucleotide polymorphisms. RESULTS: Our results showed that insulin product decreased the risk of VV with using IVW method (odds ratio [OR] = 0.73, 95% confidence interval = 0.64–0.84, P < 0.001), which was consistent with the result of MR-Egger and weighted median method. Results of MR-Egger regression showed no evidence for the presence of directional horizontal pleiotropy. CONCLUSIONS: Our study suggested that insulin product treatment had an inverse association with risk of VV.