No causal relationship between serum urate and neurodegenerative diseases: A Mendelian randomization study

Observational studies have shown that increased serum urate is associated with a lower risk of neurodegenerative diseases (NDs), but the causality remains unclear. We employed a two-sample Mendelian randomization (MR) approach to assess the causal relationship between serum urate and four common subtypes of NDs, including Parkinson's disease (PD), Alzheimer's disease (AD), amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), and multiple sclerosis (MS).

Serum urate data came from the CKDGen Consortium. GWAS data for PD, AD, ALS, and MS were obtained from four databases in the primary analysis and then acquired statistics from the FinnGen consortium for replication and meta-analysis. Inverse variance weighted (IVW), weighted median (WM), and MR-Egger regression methods were applied in the MR analyses. Pleiotropic effects, heterogeneity, and leave-one-out analyses were evaluated to validate the results.

There was no evidence for the effect of serum urate on PD (OR: 1.00, 95 % CI: 0.90-1.11, P = 0.97), AD (OR: 1.02, 95 % CI: 1.00-1.04, P = 0.06), ALS (OR: 1.05, 95 % CI: 0.97-1.13, P = 0.22), and MS (OR: 1.01, 95 % CI: 0.89-1.14, P = 0.90) risk when combined with the FinnGen consortium, neither was any evidence of pleiotropy detected between the instrumental variables (IVs).

The MR analysis suggested that serum urate may not be causally associated with a risk of PD, AD, ALS, and MS.