Genetic liability between COVID-19 and pre-eclampsia/eclampsia: a Mendelian randomization study

ABSTRACT

Objective

The aim of this study was to investigate the possible causal relationship between COVID-19 and the risk of pre-eclampsia/eclampsia using a Mendelian randomized (MR) design.

Methods

We estimated their genetic correlations and then performed two-sample Mendelian randomization analyses using pooled statistics from the COVID-19 susceptibility/hospitalization genome-wide association study and the pre-eclampsia/eclampsia datasets. The main analyses were performed using the inverse variance weighting method, supplemented by the weighted median method and the MR-Egger method.

Results

We identified a significant and positive genetic correlation between COVID-19 susceptibility and pre-eclampsia/eclampsia [OR = 1.23 (1.01–1.51), p = 0.043]. Meanwhile, hospitalization of COVID-19 was significantly associated with a higher risk of pre-eclampsia/eclampsia [OR = 1.15 (1.02–1.30), p = 0.024]. Consistently, hospitalization of COVID-19 were nominally associated with higher risk of pre-eclampsia [OR = 1.14, (1.01–1.30), p = 0.040]. The results were robust under all sensitivity analyses.

Conclusion

These results suggest that COVID-19 may increase the risk of pre-eclampsia/eclampsia. Future development of preventive or therapeutic interventions should emphasize this to mitigate the complications of COVID-19.

KEYWORDS:

• COVID-19
• eclampsia
• pre-eclampsia
• Mendelian randomizations

Highlights

• Used Mendelian randomization to probe COVID-19’s effect on pre-eclampsia/eclampsia.

• Employed data from EBI and FinnGen for analysis.

• COVID-19 susceptibility/hospitalization increases pre-eclampsia/eclampsia risk by approximately 20%.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

This is publicly available data that can be accessed at: https://www.covid19hg.org/about/, https://r8.risteys.finngen.fi/

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/10641955.2023.2285757

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Education Department of Zhejiang Province Fund under Grant (Y202249929).