AI Article Synopsis
- This study explored the potential causal relationships between factors like the number of live births, age at last live birth, and years ovulating, with the risk of endometrial cancer (EC).
- Using data from the UK Biobank, researchers conducted observational analyses and multivariate analysis to investigate how these factors interact with others, such as BMI and age at menopause.
- The findings suggest that having more live births is linked to a lower EC risk, and this relationship remains significant even when considering other risk factors, highlighting the complexity of reproductive health impacts on cancer risk.
Article Abstract
Background: Observational epidemiological studies suggest a link between several factors related to ovulation and reproductive function and endometrial cancer (EC) risk; however, it is not clear whether these relationships are causal, and whether the risk factors act independently of each other. The aim of this study was to investigate putative causal relationships between the number of live births, age at last live birth, and years ovulating and EC risk. METHODS: We conducted a series of observational analyses to investigate various risk factors and EC risk in the UK Biobank (UKBB). Additionally, multivariate analysis was performed to elucidate the relationship between the number of live births, age at last live birth, and years ovulating and other related factors such as age at natural menopause, age at menarche, and body mass index (BMI). Secondly, we used Mendelian randomization (MR) to assess if these observed relationships were causal. Genome-wide significant single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) were extracted from previous studies of woman's number of live births, age at menopause and menarche, and BMI. We conducted a genome-wide association analysis using the UKBB to identify SNPs associated with years ovulating, years using the contraceptive pill, and age at last live birth.
Results: We found evidence for a causal effect of the number of live births (inverse variance weighted (IVW) odds ratio (OR): 0.537, p = 0.006), the number of years ovulating (IVW OR: 1.051, p = 0.014), in addition to the known risk factors BMI, age at menarche, and age at menopause on EC risk in the univariate MR analyses. Due to the close relationships between these factors, we followed up with multivariable MR (MVMR) analysis. Results from the MVMR analysis showed that number of live births had a causal effect on EC risk (OR: 0.783, p = 0.036) independent of BMI, age at menarche and age at menopause.
Conclusions: MVMR analysis showed that the number of live births causally reduced the risk of EC.
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Source |
|---|---|
| http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9623961 | PMC |
| http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12916-022-02585-w | DOI Listing |
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