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Research Paper|Volume 12, Issue 5|pp 4082—4092

Obstructive sleep apnea syndrome and causal relationship with female breast cancer: a mendelian randomization study

Xiao-Ling Gao1, Zhi-Mei Jia2, Fang-Fang Zhao2, Dong-Dong An2, Bei Wang1, Er-Jing Cheng1, Yan Chen1, Jian-Nan Gong1, Dai Liu1, Ya-Qiong Huang2, Jiao-Jiao Yang2, Shu-Juan Wang2
  • 1Department of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine, The Second Hospital of Shanxi Medical University, Taiyuan 030001, P.R. China
  • 2The Second Department of Clinical Medicine, Shanxi Medical University, Taiyuan 030000, P.R. China
Received: October 15, 2019Accepted: January 2, 2020Published: February 29, 2020
https://doi.org/10.18632/aging.102725

Copyright © 2020 Gao et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Abstract

Although observational studies have reported a positive association between obstructive sleep apnea syndrome (OSAS) and breast cancer (BC) risk, causality remains inconclusive. We aim to explore whether OSAS is associated with etiology of BC by conducting a two-sample Mendelian randomization (MR) study in a Chinese population and Asian population from the Breast Cancer Association Consortium (BCAC). We found a detrimental causal effect of OSAS on BC risk in the primary analysis of our samples (IVW OR, 2.47 for BC risk per log-odds increment in OSAS risk, 95% CI = 1.86-3.27; P = 3.6×10-10). This was very similar to results of the direct observational case-control study between OSAS and BC risk (OR = 2.80; 95% CI = 2.24-3.50; P =1.4×10-19). Replication in the Asian population of the BCAC study also supported our results (IVW OR, 1.33 for BC risk per log-odds increment in OSAS risk, 95% CI = 1.13-1.56; P = 0.0006). Sensitivity analyses confirmed the robustness of our findings. We provide novel evidence that genetically determined higher risk of OSAS has a causal effect on higher risk of BC. Further studies focused on the mechanisms of the relationship between OSAS and breast carcinogenesis are needed.