Genetic liability for insomnia and asthma risk

Background

Evidence from observational studies suggested that insomnia is associated with an increased risk of asthma. Nevertheless, whether the association is causal is unknown because observational studies are susceptible to residual confounders and reverse causality.

Methods

According to published genome-wide association studies (GWASs), we obtained 149 insomnia-related single-nucleotide polymorphisms, which were used as instrumental variables in our study. The GWASs summary data on adult asthma was obtained from Medical Research Council Integrative Epidemiology Unit (MRC-IEU) (53,598 cases and 409335 controls). The random-effects inverse variance-weighted method was applied to estimate the causality between insomnia and asthma. To further evaluate the directional pleiotropy, the weighted median and MR-Egger regression methods were implemented.

Results

The results of MR analysis indicated that genetic liability to insomnia was associated with significantly higher odds of adult asthma [odds ratio (OR) = 1.0881; 95% CI 1.0837-1.0925, p < 0.0001]. The association remained in multivariable MR analysis with adjustment for depression, smoking, and education, which are genetically correlated with insomnia. Moreover, the results of the weighted median and MR-Egger regression methods suggested that there was no evidence of directional pleiotropy (p = 0.2400).

Conclusion

Our study demonstrated that liability to insomnia is probably causally associated with a modest increased risk of adult asthma. Further work is needed to elucidate the potential mechanisms.

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