key: cord-0978415-05mr64l0
authors: Qiu, Shizheng; Wang, Donghua; Zhang, Yu; Hu, Yang
title: Mendelian randomization reveals potential causal candidates for COVID-19 in 123 blood metabolites
date: 2021-09-14
journal: J Infect
DOI: 10.1016/j.jinf.2021.09.002
sha: 8a7b46d80b0af73bf31bd8670d91124e34126710
doc_id: 978415
cord_uid: 05mr64l0

nan

Genetics Initiative Round 4, including 14,134 COVID-19 cases and 1,284,876 controls. All the participants were of European descent. In stage 2, according to the assumptions of Mendelian randomization (MR) model, we chose SNPs that were strongly correlated with exposure (blood metabolites) as instruments (P < 5E-08) (4). We only kept the blood metabolites with more than 2 instruments, allowed SNPs with LD Rsq value > 0.8 as proxy SNPs in the outcome (COVID-19), and aligned strands for palindromic SNPs (4). In stage 3, we performed MR analysis using the inverse variance weighted (IVW) method, and assessed the horizontal pleiotropy of the instruments using a sensitivity test (4) . MR analysis results showed that three blood metabolite concentrations were causally related to the higher risk of COVID-19, increasing the COVID-19 infection rate by 24%, 13%, and 10% respectively, but none of them passed the adjusted significance threshold (P < 0.05/123 = 0.00041) ( Table 1 ).

In conclusion, we supported that the blood metabolite concentration might not be related to the risk of COVID-19, and therefore patients with dyslipidemia might not need specific treatment and medication, so as to avoid potential waste of medical resources (1). We thank MR-base R package and COVID-19 Host Genetics Initiative for providing GWAS summary statistics.

Shizheng Qiu, Donghua Wang and Yu Zhang have contributed equally to this work. 

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The MR-Base platform supports systematic causal inference across the human phenome. Elife