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Updated: Jul 27, 2025

The bm12 Inducible Model of Systemic Lupus Erythematosus SLE in C57BL/6 Mice
Published on: November 1, 2015
No genetic causal association between systemic lupus erythematosus and COVID-19
Shu-Zhen Xu1,2, Zhi-Xin Wang3, Xi Fang1,2
1Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, School of Public Health, Anhui Medical University, Hefei, Anhui, China.
Objective:
Emerging evidence suggests an increased prevalence of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) in patients with systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE), the prototype of autoimmune disease, compared to the general population. However, the conclusions were inconsistent, and the causal relationship between COVID-19 and SLE remains unknown.
Methods:
In this study, we aimed to evaluate the bidirectional causal relationship between COVID-19 and SLE using bidirectional Mendelian randomization (MR) analysis, including MR-Egger, weighted median, weighted mode, and the inverse variance weighting (IVW) method.
Results:
The results of IVW showed a negative effect of SLE on severe COVID-19 (OR = 0.962, p = 0.040) and COVID-19 infection (OR = 0.988, p = 0.025), which disappeared after Bonferroni correction. No causal effect of SLE on hospitalized COVID-19 was observed (OR = 0.983, p = 0.148). In the reverse analysis, no causal effects of severe COVID-19 infection (OR = 1.045, p = 0.664), hospitalized COVID-19 (OR = 0.872, p = 0.109), and COVID-19 infection (OR = 0.943, p = 0.811) on SLE were found.
Conclusion:
The findings of our bidirectional causal inference analysis did not support a genetically predicted causal relationship between SLE and COVID-19; thus, their association observed in previous observational studies may have been caused by confounding factors.
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