The role of cortisol in ischemic heart disease, ischemic stroke, type 2 diabetes, and cardiovascular disease risk factor
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RESEARCH ARTICLE
Open Access
The role of cortisol in ischemic heart disease, ischemic stroke, type 2 diabetes, and cardiovascular disease risk factors: a bidirectional Mendelian randomization study Man Ki Kwok1, Ichiro Kawachi2, David Rehkopf3 and Catherine Mary Schooling1,4*
Abstract Background: Cortisol, a steroid hormone frequently used as a biomarker of stress, is associated with cardiovascular disease (CVD) and type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM). To clarify whether cortisol causes these outcomes, we assessed the role of cortisol in ischemic heart disease (IHD), ischemic stroke, T2DM, and CVD risk factors using a bi-directional Mendelian randomization (MR) study. Methods: Single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) strongly (P < 5 × 10−6) and independently (r2 < 0.001) predicting cortisol were obtained from the CORtisol NETwork (CORNET) consortium (n = 12,597) and two metabolomics genome-wide association studies (GWAS) (n = 7824 and n = 2049). They were applied to GWAS of the primary outcomes (IHD, ischemic stroke and T2DM) and secondary outcomes (adiposity, glycemic traits, blood pressure and lipids) to obtain estimates using inverse variance weighting, with weighted median, MR-Egger, and MR-PRESSO as sensitivity analyses. Conversely, SNPs predicting IHD, ischemic stroke, and T2DM were applied to the cortisol GWAS. Results: Genetically predicted cortisol (based on 6 SNPs from CORNET; F-statistic = 28.3) was not associated with IHD (odds ratio (OR) 0.98 per 1 unit increase in log-transformed cortisol, 95% confidence interval (CI) 0.93–1.03), ischemic stroke (0.99, 95% CI 0.91–1.08), T2DM (1.00, 95% CI 0.96–1.04), or CVD risk factors. Genetically predicted IHD, ischemic stroke, and T2DM were not associated with cortisol. Conclusions: Contrary to observational studies, genetically predicted cortisol was unrelated to IHD, ischemic stroke, T2DM, or CVD risk factors, or vice versa. Our MR results find no evidence that cortisol plays a role in cardiovascular risk, casting doubts on the cortisol-related pathway, although replication is warranted. Keywords: Cortisol, Cardiovascular disease, Diabetes, Risk factors, Mendelian randomization
* Correspondence: [email protected] 1 School of Public Health, Li Ka Shing Faculty of Medicine, The University of Hong Kong, 1/F, Patrick Manson Building (North Wing), 7 Sassoon Road, Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, China 4 City University of New York Graduate School of Public Health and Health Policy, New York, USA Full list of author information is available at the end of the article © The Author(s). 2020 Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicate
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