Osteoarthritis and risk of cardiovascular diseases: A Mendelian randomization study

Observational studies have suggested that osteoarthritis may increase the risk of cardiovascular diseases. However, there is still no high-quality evidence to explain this causal relationship. We conducted a two-sample Mendelian randomization (MR) study to assess the associations of hip arthritis and knee arthritis with 14 types of cardiovascular diseases in the general population.

Genome-wide association studies for hip arthritis and knee arthritis were obtained from the UK Biobank. Genome-wide association studies of the 14 types of cardiovascular diseases we studied were extracted from the genetic consortia and the FinnGen consortium. Inverse variance weighted (IVW), maximum likelihood, weighted medium, penalized weighted median, and IVW (fixed effects) of MR were applied to a two-sample MR analysis. The mean pleiotropy of genetic variation and sensitivity analysis were used to evaluate the reliability of the results, and the MR-Egger test and leave-one-out method are the core evaluation methods.

Genetically predicted knee arthritis was causally associated with vein thromboembolism (IVW Odds Ratio (OR): 1.005, 95% Confidence Interval (CI): 0.842-1.199, P = 0.020) and pulmonary embolism (IVW OR: 1.003, 95% CI: 0.841-1.197, P = 0.025). Furthermore, hip arthritis also has a significant impact on cardiovascular diseases and is positively correlated with ischemic stroke (IVW OR: 1.086, 95% CI: 0.910-1.295, P = 0.024), atrial fibrillation (IVW OR: 1.093, 95% CI: 0.917-1.304, P = 0.019), and coronary artery disease (IVW OR: 1.061, 95% CI: 0.890-1.266, P = 0. 0.002).

Our study suggested that osteoarthritis may increase the risk of vein thromboembolism, pulmonary embolism, ischemic stroke, atrial fibrillation, and coronary artery disease. However, the findings provided no evidence to support that osteoarthritis has a large effect on the risk of cardiovascular diseases that we studied. Further research is needed to clarify the results.