Mendelian randomization analysis reveals causal relationship between obstetric-related diseases and COVID-19

Abstract

Background: Several observational studies demonstrated that pregnant individuals with COVID-19 had a higher risk of preeclampsia and preterm birth. We aimed to determine whether women with COVID-19 diagnosis had adverse pregnancy outcomes. Methods: A two-sample Mendelian randomization (MR) analysis in this study was used to evaluate the casual relationships between COVID-19 infection and obstetric-related diseases based on genome-wide association studies (GWAS) dataset. Inverse-variance weighted (IVW), MR-Egger and MR-PRESSO were used to infer the connection and estimate the pleiotropy respectively. Results: The significant connection was observed between COVID-19 and placental disorders with betaIVW of 1.57 and odds ratio (OR) of 4.81 (95% confidence interval [CI]: 1.05–22.05, p = 0.04). However, there were no associations between COVID-19 infection and gestational diabetes mellitus (GDM) (OR = 1.12; 95% CI: 0.85–1.45, p = 0.41), other disorders of amniotic fluid and membranes (OR = 0.90; 95% CI: 0.61–1.32, p = 0.59), Intrahepatic Cholestasis of Pregnancy (ICP) (OR = 1.42; 95% CI: 0.85–2.36, p = 0.18), birth weight (OR = 1.02; 95% CI: 0.99–1.05, p = 0.19), gestational hypertension (OR = 1.00; 95% CI: 1.00–1.00, p = 0.85), spontaneous miscarriages (OR = 1.00; 95% CI: 0.96–1.04, p = 0.90) and stillbirth (OR = 1.00; 95% CI: 0.98–1.01, p = 0.62). Conclusion: There was no direct causal relationship between COVID-19 infection and maternal and neonatal poor outcomes. Our study could alleviate the anxiety of pregnant women under the COVID-19 pandemic conditions partly.