Genetic liability between COVID-19 and pre-eclampsia/eclampsia: a Mendelian randomization study

The aim of this study was to investigate the possible causal relationship between COVID-19 and the risk of pre-eclampsia/eclampsia using a Mendelian randomized (MR) design.

We estimated their genetic correlations and then performed two-sample Mendelian randomization analyses using pooled statistics from the COVID-19 susceptibility/hospitalization genome-wide association study and the pre-eclampsia/eclampsia datasets. The main analyses were performed using the inverse variance weighting method, supplemented by the weighted median method and the MR-Egger method.

We identified a significant and positive genetic correlation between COVID-19 susceptibility and pre-eclampsia/eclampsia [OR = 1.23 (1.01-1.51), p = 0.043]. Meanwhile, hospitalization of COVID-19 was significantly associated with a higher risk of pre-eclampsia/eclampsia [OR = 1.15 (1.02-1.30), p = 0.024]. Consistently, hospitalization of COVID-19 were nominally associated with higher risk of pre-eclampsia [OR = 1.14, (1.01-1.30), p = 0.040]. The results were robust under all sensitivity analyses.

These results suggest that COVID-19 may increase the risk of pre-eclampsia/eclampsia. Future development of preventive or therapeutic interventions should emphasize this to mitigate the complications of COVID-19. [Figure: see text].