Evaluating the Causal Association Between Educational Attainment and Asthma Using a Mendelian Randomization Design

Abstract

Asthma is a common chronic respiratory disease. In the past 10 years, genome-wide association study (GWAS) has been widely used to identify the common asthma genetic variants. Importantly, these publicly available asthma GWAS datasets provide important data support to investigate the causal association of kinds of risk factors with asthma by a Mendelian randomization (MR) design. It is known that socioeconomic status is associated with asthma. However, it remains unclear about the causal association between socioeconomic status and asthma. Here, we selected 162 independent educational attainment genetic variants as the potential instruments to evaluate the causal association between educational attainment and asthma using large-scale GWAS datasets of educational attainment (n = 405,072) and asthma (n = 30,810). We conducted a pleiotropy analysis using the MR-Egger intercept test and the MR pleiotropy residual sum and outlier (MR-PRESSO) test. We performed an MR analysis using inverse-variance weighted, weighted median, MR-Egger, and MR-PRESSO. The main analysis method inverse-variance weighted indicated that each 1 standard deviation increase in educational attainment (3.6 years) could reduce 35% asthma risk [odds ratio (OR) = 0.65, 95% confidence interval (CI) 0.51–0.85, P = 0.001]. Importantly, evidence from other MR methods further supported this finding, including weighted median (OR = 0.55, 95% CI 0.38–0.80, P = 0.001), MR-Egger (OR = 0.48, 95% CI 0.16–1.46, P = 0.198), and MR-PRESSO (OR = 0.65, 95% CI 0.51–0.85, P = 0.0015). Meanwhile, we provide evidence to support that educational attainment protects against asthma risk dependently on cognitive performance using multivariable MR analysis. In summary, we highlight the protective role of educational attainment against asthma. Our findings may have public health applications and deserve further investigation.

Parental socioeconomic status and asthma in children: Using a population‐based cohort and family design

“…The results of the cousin analysis imply that confounding of exposures (genes and familial environment), to the extent they are shared by cousins, does not fully explain the association between parental education and asthma/wheeze over 1 year. This supports the possibility of a causal relationship between parental education and offspring asthma/wheeze, also reported by Li et al 13 Further, an association between parental education when the child was 5 years and current asthma was also seen, albeit with lower effect estimates, adding support for an association between parental education and childhood asthma. The association between low parental income and asthma/ wheeze did not follow the same pattern as parental education.…”

“…Low parental SES is associated with asthma and with asthma outcomes such as a decreased amount of dispensed controller medication, 8 increased prevalence of severe asthma 11 and increased frequency of hospitalization 12 . Though a recent Mendelian randomization study suggests that the relationship between education and asthma may be causal, 13 the association observed between parental SES and asthma could be due to unmeasured exposures shared within families (such as genes and family environment) influencing both SES and asthma (familial confounders). For example, parental childhood SES has been shown to be associated with asthma control in offspring independent of current parental SES, and an association has been found between maternal bereavement in childhood and offspring asthma 14,15 .…”

Aspectos genéticos implicados en el asma

“…Se espera que, con esta información, se realicen futuros trabajos que mejoren nuestro entendimiento sobre esta enfermedad. 34,42…”

Educational Attainment and Ischemic Stroke: A Mendelian Randomization Study

“…Here, we selected these 162 independent genetic variants as the potential instrumental variables, as provided in Table 1 and Supplementary Table S1, which could explain 1.6%-1.8% of the variance in education (Tillmann et al, 2017). Meanwhile, Li and others also selected these 162 independent genetic variants in their MR analysis to evaluate the causal association between educational attainment and asthma (Li et al, 2021).…”