Assessing the Association Between Nitrogen Dioxide Air Pollution and the Risk of Schizophreniar’s Disease by Integrating Multigenomics

Abstract

Nitrogen dioxide (NO2) is mainly discharged from the burning of fossil fuels, and remains suspended in the air with other particulate pollutants, which has a significant impact on the Earth's ecological environment and is harmful to human health.Schizophrenia is a nervous system disease involving emotion, thinking and behavior. There is no consistent conclusion about the etiology of schizophrenia, though numerous of studies are ongoing. Although previous research have suggested that exposure to NO2 air pollution can increase the risk of schizophrenia, but which is still at the preliminary exploratory stage.Here we used Mendelian Randomization (MR) analysis to assess the potential relationship between NO2 air pollution exposure level and schizophrenia from the perspective of genetic variation.To ensure the reliability of the analysis results, we also did a sensitivity analysis.All analysis results show that there is a significant causal relationship between NO2 exposure level and schizophrenia risk,which can help advance the search for the causes of schizophrenia.