Research Paper Volume 16, Issue 10 pp 8687—8696
Assessing the causal role of immune traits in rheumatoid arthritis by bidirectional Mendelian randomization analysis
- 1 Department of Emergency Surgery, Linping Campus, Second Affiliated Hospital, Zhejiang University School of Medicine, Hangzhou 311199, China
- 2 Department of Orthopaedic Trauma Surgery, The People’s Hospital of Lishui, Lishui 323000, China
Received: December 18, 2023 Accepted: April 15, 2024 Published: May 16, 2024
https://doi.org/10.18632/aging.205833How to Cite
Copyright: © 2024 Qiu 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
Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is one of the most common autoimmune joint disorders that leads to cartilage degradation. However, its specific correlation with immune cells has not been thoroughly clarified. Based on the two-sample Mendelian randomization (MR) analysis, the association between RA and 731 immune phenotypes which include morphological parameters (MP), relative cell (RC), median fluorescence intensities (MFI), and absolute cells (AC) was comprehensively determined. After false discovery rate correction, RA and immunophenotypes were statistically associated with each other. It was observed that four immune phenotypes, including 1 MPs, 8 RCs, 15 MFIs, and 10 ACs were causally associated with the risk of RA. Meanwhile, several identified immune traits could serve as independent factors for RA and be robust against pleiotropy. While considering the role of RA in immune traits, the involvement of RA in multiple immunophenotypes including CD62L- myeloid DC AC, CD3 on secreting Treg, CD3 on activated and secreting Treg, and CD3 on CD4 Treg was revealed. This study is the first comprehensive evaluation of the interaction between immune response and RA risk, thus providing therapeutic strategies for RA from an immunological perspective.
Abbreviations
RA: rheumatoid arthritis; MR: Mendelian randomization; TCM: central memory T cells; TEM: effector memory T cells; GWAS: genome-wide association study; MP: morphological parameters; RC: relative cell; MFI: median fluorescence intensities; AC: absolute cells; SNPs: single nucleotide polymorphisms; IVs: Instrumental variables; IVW: inverse variance weighting.