No Association of Polycystic Ovary Syndrome with Pancreatic Cancer: A Mendelian Randomization Study

Recently, there has been a debate regarding the association between polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) and pancreatic cancer (PC). In order to examine the causal relationship between PCOS and PC, we conducted a Mendelian randomization study, which utilized 12 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) identified from a genome-wide association study (GWAS) meta-analysis that included 10,074 PCOS cases and 103,164 controls of European ancestry as instrumental variables (IVs). The outcome data were obtained from the FinnGen database (including 605 cases and 218,187 controls). We demonstrate that genetically predicted PCOS is not causally associated with PC risk in Europeans (odds ratio = 0.99, 95% confidence interval (CI) = 0.72-1.36, p > 0.05). Sensitivity analysis showed horizontal pleiotropy (intercept p > 0.05), heterogeneity (Cochran Q p > 0.05), and the leave-one-out sensitivity test showed that individual SNP effects had no influence on the results. In conclusion, our study did not provide evidence of a causal link between PCOS and PC.

Supplementary information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s43657-024-00156-y.