J Mov Disord.  2023 Jan;16(1):79-85. 10.14802/jmd.22175.

The Effect of Blood Lipids, Type 2 Diabetes, and Body Mass Index on Parkinson’s Disease: A Korean Mendelian Randomization Study

• Park KW
• Hwang YS
• Lee SH
• Jo S
• Chung SJ

• KMID: 2539024
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.14802/jmd.22175

Abstract

Objective
Associations between various metabolic conditions and Parkinson’s disease (PD) have been previously identified in epidemiological studies. We aimed to investigate the causal effect of lipid levels, type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM), and body mass index (BMI) on PD in a Korean population via Mendelian randomization (MR).
Methods
Two-sample MR analyses were performed with inverse-variance weighted (IVW), weighted median, and MR-Egger regression approaches. We identified genetic variants associated with lipid concentrations, T2DM, and BMI in publicly available summary statistics, which were either collected from genome-wide association studies (GWASs) or from meta-analyses of GWAS that targeted only Korean individuals or East Asian individuals, including Korean individuals. The outcome dataset was a GWAS on PD performed in a Korean population.
Results
From previous GWASs and meta-analyses, we selected single nucleotide polymorphisms as the instrumental variables. Variants associated with serum levels of low-density lipoprotein cholesterol, high-density lipoprotein cholesterol, and triglycerides, as well as with T2DM and BMI, were selected (n = 11, 19, 17, 89, and 9, respectively). There were no statistically significant causal associations observed between the five exposures and PD using either the IVW, weighted median, or MR-Egger methods (p-values of the IVW method: 0.332, 0.610, 0.634, 0.275, and 0.860, respectively).
Conclusion
This study does not support a clinically relevant causal effect of lipid levels, T2DM, and BMI on PD risk in a Korean population.

Keyword

Body mass index; Hyperlipidemia; Hypertriglyceridemia; Mendelian randomization; Parkinson’s disease; Type 2 diabetes mellitus