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. 2025 Jul 7;22(1):72.
doi: 10.1186/s12986-025-00970-9.

Dietary factors and risk for endometriosis: a Mendelian randomization analysis

Xia Zhang  1   2 , Qiaomei Zheng  3   4 , Lihong Chen  5   6
Affiliations

Dietary factors and risk for endometriosis: a Mendelian randomization analysis

Xia Zhang et al. Nutr Metab (Lond). .

Abstract

Aims: Observational studies have reported an association between dietary factors and endometriosis, but the causality remains unknown. The study aimed to investigate the potential causal association between dietary factors and endometriosis using Mendelian randomization (MR).

Methods: We performed a two-sample MR analysis to investigate the effects of 18 diet-related exposure factors (alcoholic drinks per week, alcohol intake frequency, processed meat intake, poultry intake, beef intake, non-oily fish intake, oily fish intake, pork intake, lamb/mutton intake, bread intake, cheese intake, cooked vegetable intake, tea intake, fresh fruit intake, cereal intake, salad/raw vegetable intake, coffee intake, dried fruit intake) on the risk of endometriosis using summary statistics from the genome-wide association study (GWAS). The inverse variance weighted (IVW) method was used to deduce the causal association between dietary factors and endometriosis, and sensitivity analyses were further performed.

Results: Processed meat intake (OR = 0.550; 95%CI:0.314-0.965; p = 0.037) and salad / raw vegetable intake (OR = 0.346; 95%CI:0.127-0.943; p = 0.038) were discovered as protective factors for endometriosis. Heterogeneity test revealed no significant heterogeneity (processed meat intake: pIVW=0.607, pMR-Egger=0.548; salad / raw vegetable intake: pIVW=0.678, pMR-Egger=0.620). MR-Egger regression test didn't support any evidence for horizontal pleiotropy (processed meat intake: p for intercept = 0.865; salad / raw vegetable intake: p for intercept = 0.725). No causal relationship was found between other dietary intakes and endometriosis.

Conclusion: These findings suggest that processed meat intake and salad/raw vegetable intake are associated with a decreased risk of endometriosis, but further investigation is required.

Keywords: Causal association; Dietary intake; Endometriosis; Mendelian randomization; Processed meat intake; Salad/raw vegetable intake.

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Conflict of interest statement

Declarations. Consent for publication: Not Applicable. Competing interests: The authors declare no competing interests. Publisher’s note: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article, or claim that may be made by its manufacturer, is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher. Ethics approval and consent to participate: Ethical approval was not needed for this current study because it is a secondary analysis of previously published data. Informed consent: For this type of article, informed consent is not required.

Figures

Fig. 1
Fig. 1
Flowchart of MR analysis in this study. GWAS, genome-wide association studies; SNPs, single-nucleotide polymorphisms; MAF, minor allele frequency; MR, mendelian Randomization
Fig. 2
Fig. 2
Assumption of the Mendelian randomization study
Fig. 3
Fig. 3
The causal effect of 18 dietary factors on endometriosis based on the IVW method. IVW, inverse-variance weighted
Fig. 4
Fig. 4
Scatter plot, forest plot, funnel plot and leave-one-out analysis of the causal effect of dietary factors on endometriosis risk
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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