Minimal effect of sleep on the risk of age-related macular degeneration: a Mendelian randomization study

Observational studies have shown that sleep pattern is associated with age-related macular degeneration (AMD), but whether sleep pattern is a causal factor for AMD remains unclear. This study aims to use Mendelian randomization (MR) analysis to investigate the potential causal relationship between sleep traits and AMD.

This is a two-sample MR study. The single-nucleotide polymorphisms associated with AMD and early AMD were selected as the outcome from two different genome-wide association studies (GWAS): the early AMD GWAS with 14,034 cases and 91,214 controls, and AMD GWAS with 3,553 cases and 147,089 controls. The datasets of sleep duration, daytime dozing, and sleeplessness were used as exposure, which comprised nearly 0.46 million participants. Inverse-variance weighted method was used as the main result, and comprehensive sensitivity analyses were conducted to estimate the robustness of identified associations and the impact of potential horizontal pleiotropy.

Through MR analysis, we found that sleep duration was significantly associated with AMD (OR = 0.983, 95% CI = 0.970-0.996, P-value = 0.01). We also found suggestive evidence for the association of genetically predicted sleep duration with early AMD, which showed a consistent direction of effect with a marginal significance (OR = 0.724, 95% CI = 0.503-1.041, P-value = 0.08). Sensitivity analyses further supported the robustness of the causal relationship between sleep duration and AMD. However, we were unable to determine the relationship between daytime dozing or sleeplessness and AMD (including early AMD) (P-value > 0.05).

Sleep duration affects the causal risk for AMD; that is, longer sleep duration reduces the risk of AMD, while shorter sleep duration increases the risk of AMD. Although the influence is minimal, keeping adequate sleep duration is recommended, especially for patients with intermediate or advanced AMD.