Exploring the association between COVID-19 and male genital cancer risk in European population: evidence from mendelian randomization analysis

Abstract

Background: Recently accumulated evidence indicates a potential association between COVID-19 and elevated susceptibility to cancer, including male genital cancer. However, the causal nature of this relationship remains unclear.

Methods: In this Mendelian randomization (MR) study, we investigated the potential causal relationship between COVID-19 and male genital cancer using genetic variants as instrumental variables. We utilized summary statistics from two large-scale genome-wide association studies of COVID-19 hospitalized Vs. controls, as well as data from a population-based male genital cancer database based on European ancestry. We applied stringent quality control measures to select instrumental variables, including checking for linkage disequilibrium, removing low-quality variants, and assessing the strength of the instruments using the F-statistic. We conducted the MR analysis using the inverse-variance weighted method and several sensitivity analyses (including MR Egger and Weighted Median MR analysis) to test the robustness of our results.

Results: Our MR analysis revealed no causal associations between COVID-19 hospitalization and the incidence of male genital cancer. In the inverse-variance weighted analysis, no causal associations were observed between patients with COVID-19 hospitalization and the incidence of male genital cancer (odds ratio = 1.000 and 95% confidence interval = 0.998-1.001, p = 0.668). The estimated causal effect was consistent across all sensitivity analyses (including the Weighted Median, the MR Egger analysis, and the MR PROSSO analysis). The leave-one-out analysis showed that there was no any sing Single-nucleotide polymorphism significantly influencing our results.

Conclusions: Our study provides evidence that there is no causal association between COVID-19 hospitalization and male genital cancer.

Keywords: COVID-19; Causal associations; Genetic variants; Male genital cancer; Mendelian randomization.

Fig. 1

Scatter plot to visualize the causal effect of COVID-19 and male genital cancer. The magnitude of the causal association can be inferred from the slope of the straight line. IVW = inverse-variance weighted; and MR = Mendelian randomization

Fig. 2

The forest plot to visualize the individual and overall causal effects

Fig. 3

The leave-one-out plot to visualize the effect of SNP on the overall effects

Fig. 4

The funnel plot to visualize the potential heterogeneity