The genetic liability to rheumatoid arthritis may decrease hepatocellular carcinoma risk in East Asian population: a Mendelian randomization study

Abstract

Background: Patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA) have a rising possibility of acquiring certain kinds of cancers than the general public. The causal risk association between RA and hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) remains unknown. Methods: Genetic summary data from genome-wide association study (GWAS), including RA (n = 19,190) and HCC (n = 197,611), was analyzed. The inverse-variance weighted (IVW) approach was used as the principal analysis, complemented with weighted median, weighted mode, simple median method, and MR-Egger analyses. The genetic data of RA (n = 212,453) was used to verify the results in eastern Asia populations. Results: The results from the IVW methods indicated that genetically predicted RA was significantly linked with a declined possibility of HCC for East Asians (OR = 0.86; 95% CI: 0.78, 0.95; p = 0.003). The weighted median and the weighted mode also supported similar results (all p < 0.05). Additionally, neither the funnel plots nor the MR-Egger intercepts revealed any directional pleiotropic effects between RA and HCC. Moreover, the other set of RA data validated the results. Conclusion: The RA may decrease the risk of being susceptible to the HCC in eastern Asia populations, which was beyond expectation. In the future, additional investigations should be made into potential biomedical mechanisms.