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Research Paper|Volume 16, Issue 8|pp 7357—7386

Heart failure potentially affects the cortical structure of the brain

Yinqin Hu1, Tianyun Shi1, Zhaohui Xu1, Meng Zhang1, Jiahui Yang1, Zhirui Liu1, Qiqi Wan1, Yongming Liu1,2
  • 1Department of Cardiovascular Disease, Shuguang Hospital Affiliated to Shanghai University of Traditional Chinese Medicine, Shanghai, China
  • 2Anhui Provincial Hospital of Integrated Medicine, Anhui Hospital of Shuguang Hospital Affiliated to Shanghai University of TCM, Hefei 230011, Anhui, China
* Equal contribution
Received: October 31, 2023Accepted: March 25, 2024Published: April 22, 2024
https://doi.org/10.18632/aging.205762

Copyright: © 2024 Hu et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Abstract

Background: Heart failure (HF) has been reported to affect cerebral cortex structure, but the underlying cause has not been determined. This study used Mendelian randomization (MR) to reveal the causal relationship between HF and structural changes in the cerebral cortex.

Methods: HF was defined as the exposure variable, and cerebral cortex structure was defined as the outcome variable. Inverse-variance weighted (IVW), MR-Egger regression and weighted median (WME) were performed for MR analysis; MR-PRESSO and Egger’s intercept was used to test horizontal pleiotropy; and “leave-one-out” was used for sensitivity analysis.

Results: Fifty-two single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) were defined as instrumental variables (IVs), and there was no horizontal pleiotropy in the IVs. According to the IVW analysis, the OR and 95% CI of cerebral cortex thickness were 0.9932 (0.9868-1.00) (P=0.0402), and the MR-Egger intercept was -15.6× 10-5 (P = 0.7974) and the Global test pval was 0.078. The P-value of the cerebral cortex surface was 0.2205, and the MR-Egger intercept was -34.69052 (P= 0.6984) and the Global Test pval was 0.045. HF had a causal effect on the surface area of the caudal middle frontal lobule (P=0.009), insula lobule (P=0.01), precuneus lobule (P=0.049) and superior parietal lobule (P=0.044).

Conclusions: HF was potentially associated with changes in cortical thickness and in the surface area of the caudal middle frontal lobule, insula lobule, precuneus lobule and superior parietal lobule.