scholarly journals The association between low-density lipoprotein cholesterol predicted by HMGCR genetic variants and breast cancer risk may be mediated by body mass index

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Siddhartha P. Kar ◽  
Hermann Brenner ◽  
Graham G. Giles ◽  
Dezheng Huo ◽  
Roger L. Milne ◽  
...  

Orho-Melander et al. recently reported that lower low-density lipoprotein cholesterol (LDLC) as predicted by the T-allele of the variant rs12916 in HMGCR is associated with a decreased risk of developing breast cancer [odds ratio (OR) = 0.89; 95% confidence interval (CI): 0.82–0.96].1 This analysis was embedded in a wider Mendelian randomization (MR) study performed using genotype data from a prospective cohort of 26,589 individuals that included 16,022 women and 1176 incident breast cancer cases. HMGCR encodes 3-hydroxy-3-methylglutaryl-coenzyme A reductase, the enzyme inhibited by statins. The T-allele of rs12916 is associated with reduced HMGCR expression and therefore, in principle, its effects should be analogous to the effects of lifelong statin administration starting at birth.2 The MR study of Orho-Melander et al. also found that a genome-wide LDLC score based on 32 independent LDLC-associated single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) was not associated with breast cancer. In light of this finding, they suggest that the protective effect of the rs12916 T-allele on breast cancer may either be specific to LDLC lowering via genetic inhibition of HMGCR or be the result of a distinct mechanism that is regulated by rs12916 and HMGCR.

2022 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jiang-Shan Tan ◽  
Meng-Jin Hu ◽  
Yan-Min Yang ◽  
Yue-Jin Yang

Background: Previous observational studies provided conflicting results on the association between low-density lipoprotein cholesterol (LDL-C) level and the risk of Alzheimer's disease (AD).Objective: We used two-sample Mendelian randomization (MR) study to explore the causal associations between LDL-C level and the risks of individual, paternal, maternal, and family history of AD.Methods: Summary-level genetic data for LDL-C were acquired from results of the UK Biobank GWAS. Corresponding data for paternal, maternal, and family history of AD were obtained from the NHGRI-EBI Catalog of human genome-wide association studies. Data for individual AD were obtained from the MR-Base platform. A two-sample MR study was performed to explore the causal association between LDL-C level and the risks of individual, paternal, maternal, and family history of AD.Results: Genetically predicted LDL-C was positively associated with individual [Odds ratio (OR) = 1.509, 95% confidence interval (CI) = 1.140–1.999; P = 4.0 × 10−3], paternal [OR = 1.109, 95% CI = 1.053–1.168; P = 9.5 × 10−5], maternal [OR = 1.132, 95% CI = 1.070–1.199; P = 2.0 × 10−5], and family history of AD [OR = 1.124, 95% CI = 1.070–1.181; P = 3.7 × 10−6] in inverse variance weighted analysis. After performing weighted median and MR-Egger analysis, consistent results were observed. There was no horizontal pleiotropy in the two-sample MR analysis.Conclusions: High level of LDL-C may increase the risks of both individual and familial AD. Decreasing the LDL-C to a reasonable level may help to reduce the related risk.


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