The Association Between Vitamin C and Cancer: A Two-Sample Mendelian Randomization Study

Abstract

In recent years, many studies have indicated that vitamin C might be negatively associated with the risk of cancer, but the actual relationship between vitamin C and cancer remains ambivalent. Therefore, we utilized a two-sample Mendelian randomization (MR) study to explore the causal associations of genetically predicted vitamin C with the risk of a variety of cancers. Single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) associated with vitamin C at a significance level of p < 5 × 10–8 and with a low level of linkage disequilibrium (LD) (r2 < 0.01) were selected from a genome-wide association study (GWAS) meta-analysis of plasmid concentration of vitamin C consisting of 52,018 individuals. The data of the GWAS outcomes were obtained from United Kingdom Biobank, FinnGen Biobank and the datasets of corresponding consortia. In the inverse-variance weight (IVW) method, our results did not support the causal association of genetically predicted vitamin C with the risk of overall cancer and 14 specific types of cancer. Similar results were observed in sensitivity analyses where the weighted median and MR-Egger methods were adopted, and heterogeneity and pleiotropy were not observed in statistical models. Therefore, our study suggested that vitamin C was not causally associated with the risk of cancer. Further studies are warranted to discover the potential protective and therapeutic effects of vitamin C on cancer, and its underlying mechanisms.