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Mendelian randomization study indicates lack of causal relationship between physical activity and lung cancer

  • Original Article – Cancer Research
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Journal of Cancer Research and Clinical Oncology Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Background

Previous researches have indicated physical activity (PA) may be associated with lower risk of lung cancer. However, causal relationship between PA and risk of lung cancer is not clear. We aimed to inspect the causal effect of PA on lung cancer.

Methods

We analyzed summary data of accelerator-measured PA and lung cancer from the genome-wide association study (GWAS) using two‐sample Mendelian randomization (MR) method. We obtained summary data of accelerator-measured PA from UK Biobank, data of lung cancer patients from Consortium and International Lung Cancer Consortium (ILCCO) to investigate possible causal effect of PA on lung cancer.

Results

According to result of MR using inverse variance weighted method (IVW), we found that genetically predicted higher PA level did not causally decrease risk of lung cancer (OR 0.95, 95% CI 0.88–1.03, p = 0.238). Results of MR-Egger and weighted median method were consistent with IVW method.

Conclusion

Our mendelian randomization study showed that genetically higher PA is not causally associated with risk of lung cancer. More researches are needed to investigate relationship between PA and lung cancer.

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Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are openly available in [UK Biobank] at https://doi.org/10.1038/s41366-018-0120-3, [ILCCO] at https://doi.org/10.1038/ng.3002, reference number [9,10].

Abbreviations

PA:

Physical activity

MR:

Mendelian randomization

SNP:

Single-nucleotide polymorphisms

CI:

Confidence interval

GWAS:

Genome-wide association study

IVW:

Inverse variance weighted

References

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Funding

This work was supported by the National Key R&D Program of China (2016YFC0905500, 2016YFC0905503), the Science and Technology Program of Guangdong (2017B020227001) and the Science and Technology Program of Guangzhou (201704020072). The funders had no role in the design of the study; the collection, analysis, and interpretation of the data; the writing of the manuscript; and the decision to submit the manuscript for publication.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Contributions

WX, JYS, HQZ and LZ designed the study. WX, JYS analysed the data and interpreted the results with the help of JQL, YXZ and ZHZ. WX and JYS drafted the paper. TZ, SDH, YPY, WFF, HYZ and YH critically revised the paper. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Li Zhang.

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Conflict of interest

None.

Ethical approval and consent to participants

Patient consent and ethical approval were waived in our research because they were obtained from the previous original studies.

Code availability statement

The R code for analysis is not publicly available, but is available from corresponding author if required.

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Xian, W., Shen, J., Zhou, H. et al. Mendelian randomization study indicates lack of causal relationship between physical activity and lung cancer. J Cancer Res Clin Oncol 147, 177–181 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00432-020-03409-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00432-020-03409-1

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