Cigarette smoking and thyroid cancer risk: A Mendelian randomization study

The association between cigarette smoking and thyroid cancer has been reported in prospective cohort studies, but the relationship remains controversial. To investigate this potential correlation further, we employed Mendelian randomization methodology to evaluate the causative impact of smoking on thyroid cancer incidence.

From the genome-wide association study and Sequencing Consortium of Alcohol and Nicotine use, we obtained genetic variants associated with smoking initiation and cigarettes per day (1.2 million individuals). We also extracted genetic variants associated with past tobacco smoking from the UK Biobank (424,960 individuals). Thyroid cancer outcomes were selected from the FinnGen GWAS (989 thyroid cancer cases and 217,803 control cases). Sensitivity analyses employing various approaches such as weighted median, MR-Egger, and MR-pleiotropy residual sum and outlier (MR-PRESSO) have been executed, as well as leave-one-out analysis to identify pleiotropy.

Using the IVW approach, we did not find evidence that any of the three smoking phenotypes were related to thyroid cancer (smoking initiation: odds ratio (OR) = 1.56, p = 0.61; cigarettes per day: OR = 0.85, p = 0.51; past tobacco smoking: OR = 0.80, p = 0.78). The heterogeneity (p > 0.05) and pleiotropy (p > 0.05) testing provided confirmatory evidence for the validity of our MR estimates.

The MR analysis revealed that there may not exist a causative link between smoking exposure and elevated incidence rates of thyroid malignancies.