Assessing the causal effects of and on constipation: a Mendelian randomized study.

Background: Constipation is affected by a number of risk variables, including cardiovascular disease and growth factors. However, the impacts of gut flora on constipation incidence has not been shown. This work, Single-Variable Mendelian Randomization (SVMR) was utilized to estimate the causal relationship between the or , and constipation.

Methods: Data for constipation, and were taken from the Integrated Epidemiology Unit (IEU) open GWAS database. Including 218,792 constipation samples, and there were 16,380,466 Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms (SNPs) for constipation. The ids of and were sourced from MiBioGen database. The sample count for the was 17,380, with 656 SNPs. In addition, the sample size for was 15,339, with 545 SNPs. The SVMR was performed to assess the risk of and in constipation using weighted median, MR Egger, simple mode, inverse variance weighted (IVW), and weighted mode. Finally, we did a sensitivity analysis that included a heterogeneity, horizontal pleiotropy, and Leave-One-Out (LOO) test to examine the viability of the MR data.

Results: The SVMR revealed that the and were causally connected to constipation, with ( = 0.042, OR = 1.074) as a hazardous factor and ( = 0.004, OR = 0.909) as a safety factor. Sensitivity tests then revealed the absence of variability between the constipation and the exposure factors ( and ). Additionally, there were no other confounding factors and the examined SNPs could only influence constipation through the aforementioned exposure factors, respectively. As a result, the MR results were fairly robust.

Conclusion: Our investigation verified the causal links between the or , and constipation, with greater expression increasing the likelihood of constipation and the opposite being true for the .