Diet-Derived Circulating Antioxidants and Risk of Stroke: A Mendelian Randomization Study

Oxidative stress is crucial in stroke pathogenesis. Many cohort-based studies suggested that the intake of exogenous antioxidants originated from food may prevent stroke. However, the corresponding randomized controlled trials did not show diet-derived antioxidants have a protective effect on stroke.

To examine the association of genetically proxied diet-derived antioxidants with stroke risk using Mendelian randomization.

We performed a two-sample Mendelian randomization (MR) analysis to evaluate the causal effect of diet-derived antioxidants on stroke risk. For exposure data, we extracted genetic variants as instrumental variables (IVs) that are strongly associated with frequently used diet-derived antioxidants, including vitamin C, vitamin E (α-tocopherol, γ-tocopherol), carotene, retinol, zinc, and selenium, from a large-scale genome-wide association study (GWAS). We obtained IVs' corresponding effect estimates on the risk of total stroke and ischemic stroke from a GWAS meta-analysis with 40,585 cases and 406,111 controls. Finally, we applied five types of Mendelian randomization analysis to obtain preliminary MR results and performed four three kinds of sensitivity analysis to verify them.

According to the primary MR estimations and further sensitivity analyses, we established two robust associations after Bonferroni correction: genetically proxied circulating γ-tocopherol was causally associated with total stroke [odds ratio (OR) = 0.68, 95% confidence interval (CI) (0.52-0.88), p = 3.78E - 03] and ischemic stroke [OR = 0.66, 95% CI (0.51-0.86), p = 2.34E - 03]. There was no evidence to support the causal effect of other diet-derived antioxidants on the risk of total stroke and ischemic stroke.

Our study revealed a protective impact of genetic susceptibility to high circulating γ-tocopherol levels on stroke risk, providing new information on the potential therapeutic targets for primary stroke prevention.