Associations between metabolic traits and gout risk

Gout is an inflammatory condition primarily driven by elevated serum urate levels, with metabolic factors playing key roles. Mendelian randomization (MR) was employed to assess the causal impact of 249 specific metabolic traits on gout risk. We used data from the UK Biobank as exposures and conducted a MR analysis with gout as the outcome of a large-scale association study. The inverse-variance-weighted method served as the primary analytical approach, supplemented by the weighted median and MR-Egger techniques. False discovery rate corrections and the MR Pleiotropy Residual Sum and Outlier method were applied to ensure robust results. Significant associations were found for alanine levels, glycoprotein acetyls, ratio of cholesteryl esters to total lipids in medium very low-density lipoprotein, ratio of triglycerides to phosphoglycerides, and triglyceride to total lipid ratio in very large high-density lipoprotein, indicating that these metabolic traits are causally linked to gout. Our findings confirmed the causal relationships between certain metabolic profiles and the risk of developing gout, highlighting potential targets for preventive and therapeutic interventions.