Coeliac disease and postpartum depression: are they linked? A two-sample Mendelian randomization study

TL;DR

This study investigates if there is a genetic link between coeliac disease and postpartum depression using Mendelian randomization.

Contribution

The study provides new evidence of a potential causal relationship between coeliac disease and postpartum depression using genetic data.

Findings

A genetically predicted risk of coeliac disease is associated with an increased risk of postpartum depression (OR = 1.022).

No significant link was found between coeliac disease and depression in general.

Sensitivity analyses confirmed the robustness of the findings with no evidence of pleiotropy or heterogeneity.

Abstract

To explore the potential causal associations between coeliac disease(CD) and postpartum depression(PPD) by using two-sample Mendelian randomization(MR) analysis.

The IEU OPEN GWAS project was utilized to identify genetic loci strongly associated with CD as instrumental variables (IVs), and MR analysis was performed using inverse variance weighting(IVW), weighted median, weighted model, and MR-Egger. MR analyses were used to examine whether there was a link between CD and PPD, with an OR and 95% CI. Meanwhile, the relationship between CD and depression(DP) was analyzed using MR. The sensitivity analysis was conducted using MR-Egger intercept analysis, Cochran’s Q test, and leave-one-out analysis.

From the GWAS online database, 13 single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) were chosen as IVs. The IVW results showed a relationship between PPD and a genetically predicted risk of developing CD (OR = 1.022, 95% CI: 1.001–1.044, P = 0.043). However, the presence of DP was not linked with CD (OR=0.991, 95% CI: 0.978–1.003, P=0.151). Potential horizontal pleiotropy was not discovered using MR-Egger intercept analysis (PPD: P=0.725; DP: P=0.785), and Cochran’s Q test for heterogeneity revealed no significant heterogeneity (PPD: P=0.486; DP: P=0.909). A leave-one-out analysis found that individual SNPs had minimal effect on overall causal estimations.

MR research discovered a link between CD and PPD.

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