Volume 33, Issue 1 e14979
RESEARCH ARTICLE

Exploring genetic associations between vitiligo and mental disorders using Mendelian randomization

Yingwei Wang

Yingwei Wang

Department of Dermatology, The Second Affiliated Hospital and Yuying Children's Hospital of Wenzhou Medical University, Wenzhou, China

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Tao Yao

Tao Yao

Department of Cardiology, The Second Affiliated Hospital and Yuying Children's Hospital of Wenzhou Medical University, Wenzhou, China

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Yunlu Lin

Yunlu Lin

Department of Cardiology, The Second Affiliated Hospital and Yuying Children's Hospital of Wenzhou Medical University, Wenzhou, China

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Lili Ye

Lili Ye

Department of Dermatology, The Second Affiliated Hospital and Yuying Children's Hospital of Wenzhou Medical University, Wenzhou, China

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Shuting Li

Shuting Li

Department of Dermatology, The Second Affiliated Hospital and Yuying Children's Hospital of Wenzhou Medical University, Wenzhou, China

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Yu Gao

Corresponding Author

Yu Gao

Department of Dermatology, The Second Affiliated Hospital and Yuying Children's Hospital of Wenzhou Medical University, Wenzhou, China

Correspondence

Yu Gao and Jianming Wu, Department of Dermatology, The Second Affiliated Hospital and Yuying Children's Hospital of Wenzhou Medical University, No. 109, Xueyuan West Road, Lucheng District, Wenzhou, ZheJiang Province 325027, China.

Email: [email protected] and [email protected]

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Jianming Wu

Corresponding Author

Jianming Wu

Department of Dermatology, The Second Affiliated Hospital and Yuying Children's Hospital of Wenzhou Medical University, Wenzhou, China

Correspondence

Yu Gao and Jianming Wu, Department of Dermatology, The Second Affiliated Hospital and Yuying Children's Hospital of Wenzhou Medical University, No. 109, Xueyuan West Road, Lucheng District, Wenzhou, ZheJiang Province 325027, China.

Email: [email protected] and [email protected]

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First published: 17 November 2023

Abstract

Although a large number of existing studies have confirmed that people with vitiligo are prone to mental disorders, these observational studies may be subject to confounding factors and reverse causality, so the true causal relationship is inconclusive. We conducted a bidirectional Mendelian randomization (MR) analysis to assess the causality between vitiligo and mental disorders, namely depression, anxiety, insomnia, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) and attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Summary statistics from large available genome-wide association study (GWAS) datasets for generalized vitiligo (n = 44 266), depression (n = 173 005), anxiety (n = 17 310), insomnia (n = 386 988), schizophrenia (n = 130 644), bipolar disorder (n = 413 466), OCD (n = 9725) and ADHD (n = 225 534) were utilized. Inverse-variance weighted (IVW), MR-Egger and weighted median were employed to estimate causal effects. Sensitivity analysis and MR Pleiotropy Residual Sum and Outliers (MR PRESSO) were conducted to assess heterogeneity and pleiotropy, ensuring the robustness of the results. Additionally, we corrected for estimating bias that might be brought on by sample overlap using MRlap. In our findings, none of the rigorous bidirectional MR analyses uncovered a significant causal association. Even after applying the MRlap correction, the effect sizes remained statistically nonsignificant, thereby reinforcing the conclusions drawn via IVW. In summary, our genetic-level investigation did not reveal a causal link between generalized vitiligo and mental disorders.

CONFLICT OF INTEREST STATEMENT

The authors have no conflicts of interest to declare.

DATA AVAILABILITY STATEMENT

The GWAS data used in our analysis are from published GWAS original texts or public open databases, and we would like to thank the original data contributors who contributed to this analysis, without whose research we would not have been able to conduct this analysis. Links or websites where the data used in this paper are detailed in Table 1.

The full text of this article hosted at iucr.org is unavailable due to technical difficulties.