An Updated Mendelian Randomization Analysis of the Association Between Serum Calcium Levels and the Risk of Alzheimer’s Disease

• Main Authors: Yuchen Shi, Ruifei Liu, Ying Guo, Qiwei Li, Haichun Zhou, Shaolei Yu, Hua Liang, Zeguang Li
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Frontiers Media S.A. 2021-09-01
• Series: Frontiers in Genetics
• Subjects: Alzheimer’s disease; serum calcium; GWAS; Mendelian randomization; weighted median
• Online Access: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fgene.2021.731391/full

It has been a long time that the relationship between serum calcium levels and Alzheimer’s disease (AD) remains unclear. Until recently, observational studies have evaluated the association between serum calcium levels and the risk of AD, however, reported inconsistent findings. Meanwhile, a Mendelian randomization (MR) study had been conducted to test the causal association between serum calcium levels and AD risk, however, only selected 6 serum calcium SNPs as the instrumental variables. Hence, these findings should be further verified using additional more genetic variants and large-scale genome-wide association study (GWAS) dataset to increase the statistical power. Here, we conduct an updated MR analysis of the causal association between serum calcium levels and the risk of AD using a two-stage design. In discovery stage, we conducted a MR analysis using 14 SNPs from serum calcium GWAS dataset (N = 61,079), and AD GWAS dataset (N = 63,926, 21,982 cases, 41,944 cognitively normal controls). All four MR methods including IVW, weighted median, MR-Egger, and MR-PRESSO showed a reduced trend of AD risk with the increased serum calcium levels. In the replication stage, we performed a MR analysis using 166 SNPs from serum calcium GWAS dataset (N = 305,349), and AD GWAS dataset (N = 63,926, 21,982 cases, 41,944 cognitively normal controls). Only the weighted median indicated that genetically increased serum calcium level was associated with the reduced risk of AD. Hence, additional studies are required to investigate these findings.