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Smoking and alcohol consumption with the risk of 11 common otolaryngological diseases: a bidirectional Mendelian randomization

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Abstract

Purpose

In this study, a bidirectional mendelian randomization was applied to evaluate the association of smoking and alcohol consumption with 11 otolaryngological diseases.

Methods

A total of 85,22,34 and 7 single nucleotide polymorphisms were used as instrumental variables for smoking initiation, cigarettes per day, alcoholic drinks per week and alcohol consumption, respectively. Genetic associations with 11 common otolaryngological diseases were obtained from the UK Biobank and FinnGen dataset. IVW, weighted median, MR-Egger, MR-PRESSO and leave-one-out method were used in this analysis.

Results

Smoking initiation increased the risk of vocal cord and larynx diseases (OR 1.002; 95% CI 1.001–1.004; P = 4 × 10–4), head and neck cancer (OR 1.001; 95% CI 0.999–1.003; P = 0.027), thyroid cancer (OR 1.538; 95% CI 1.006–2.351; P = 0.047) and sleep apnoea (OR 1.286; 95% CI 1.099–1.506; P = 0.002). Cigarettes per day was associated with chronic sinusitis (OR 1.152; 95% CI 1.002–1.324; P = 0.046), chronic rhinitis and pharyngitis (OR 1.200; 95% CI 1.033–1.393; P = 0.017), vocal cord and larynx diseases (OR 1.001; 95% CI 0.999–1.002; P = 0.021) and head and neck cancer (OR 1.001; 95% CI 0.999–1.003; P = 0.017). Alcoholic drinks per week only was significantly associated with the risk of head and neck cancer (OR 1.003; 95% CI 1.001–1.006; P = 0.014). However, there was no evidence to support that genetically predicted alcohol consumption increased the risk of otolaryngological diseases. Reverse MR also did not find outcomes effect on exposures.

Conclusion

This study shows that smoking and heavy alcohol consumption promote the occurrence of some otolaryngological diseases indicating that lifestyle modification might be beneficial in preventing otolaryngological diseases.

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Data availability

All data used to support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon request.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to express our gratitude to UK biobank dataset and Finngen study for sharing data. Thanks to all the peer reviewers for their opinions and suggestions.

Funding

This work was supported by funding from Tianjin Natural Science Foundation (number: 21JCYBJC00890) and Science and Technology Project of Tianjin Health Commission (Grant numbers: ZC20014).

Author information

Author notes

  1. Xu Wang, Yuewei Bi and Guangping Liu have contributed equally to this work.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Otorhinolaryngology, Tianjin Children’s Hospital (Children’s Hospital of Tianjin University), Tianjin, China

    Xu Wang & Guangping Liu

  2. Department of the Graduate School, Tianjin Medical University, Tianjin, China

    Yuewei Bi

  3. Department of Surgery, Tianjin Children’s Hospital (Children’s Hospital of Tianjin University), 225 Machang Road, Tianjin, 300000, China

    Yuewei Bi & Hualei Cui

  4. Institute of Pediatrics, Tianjin Children’s Hospital (Children’s Hospital of Tianjin University), Tianjin, China

    Yuewei Bi, Wei Wang & Hualei Cui

Authors
  1. Xu Wang
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  2. Yuewei Bi
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  3. Guangping Liu
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  4. Wei Wang
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Contributions

Conceptualization, XW, YB; data curation, XW, YB and GL; funding acquisition, HC; methodology, HC; software, XW, YB, GL and WW; supervision, HC; visualization, XW, YB; writing—original draft, XW; writing—review and editing, HC.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Hualei Cui.

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The authors declare that they have no competing interests.

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The included studies have been approved by the appropriate institutional review boards and ethics committees and all participants have signed the informed consent.

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Supplementary Information

Below is the link to the electronic supplementary material.

405_2023_8246_MOESM1_ESM.docx

Supplementary Fig. 1 Scatter plots for single-nucleotide polymorphisms associated with smoking effect on Vocal cord and larynx diseases, Head and neck cancer, Thyroid cancer and Sleep apnoea (DOCX 740 KB)

405_2023_8246_MOESM2_ESM.docx

Supplementary Fig. 2. Scatter plots for single-nucleotide polymorphisms associated with cigarettes per day effect on chronic sinusitis, chronic rhinitis and pharyngitis, vocal cord and larynx diseases and head and neck cancer (DOCX 18 KB)

405_2023_8246_MOESM3_ESM.docx

Supplementary Fig. 3 Scatter plots for single-nucleotide polymorphisms associated with alcoholic drinks per week effect on Head and neck cancer (DOCX 396 KB)

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Supplementary file 1 The detailed summary of instrumental variables associated with smoking initiation, cigarettes per day, alcohol consumption and alcoholic drinks per week (DOCX 22 KB)

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Supplementary file 2 Palindromic sequences of smoking initiation, cigarettes per day and alcohol consumption (DOCX 23 KB)

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Supplementary file 3 Assessing the proportion of phenotypic variation (R2) and weak instrument bias (F statistics) (DOCX 16 KB)

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Supplementary file 4 The detailed summary of instrumental variables associated with vocal cord and larynx diseases (DOCX 79 KB)

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Supplementary file 5 Assessing the proportion of phenotypic variation (R2) and weak instrument bias (F statistics) in the reverse MR analysis (DOCX 694 KB)

Supplementary file 6 Pleiotropy of instrumental variables through MR-Egger intercept (DOCX 545 KB)

405_2023_8246_MOESM10_ESM.docx

Supplementary file 7 MR leave-one-out sensitivity analysis for smoking initiation on vocal cord and larynx diseases, head and neck cancer, thyroid cancer and sleep apnoea (DOCX 156 KB)

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Supplementary file 8 The MR-PRESSO method of Smoking and drinking behaviours on several otolaryngological diseases (DOCX 34 KB)

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Supplementary file 9 MR leave-one-out sensitivity analysis for cigarettes per day on chronic sinusitis, chronic rhinitis and pharyngitis, head and neck cancer and vocal cord and larynx diseases (DOCX 16 KB)

Supplementary file 10 Heterogeneity of single-nucleotide polymorphism effect estimates by IVW and MR-Egger (DOCX 19 KB)

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Supplementary file 11 MR leave-one-out sensitivity analysis for alcoholic drinks per week on head and neck cancer (DOCX 23 KB)

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Supplementary file 12 Mendelian randomisation results of several otolaryngological diseases on the smoking and drinking behaviours (DOCX 22 KB)

405_2023_8246_MOESM16_ESM.docx

ssSupplementary file 13 Leave-one-out sensitivity analysis for several otolaryngological diseases on smoking and drinking behaviours (DOCX 19 KB)

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Wang, X., Bi, Y., Liu, G. et al. Smoking and alcohol consumption with the risk of 11 common otolaryngological diseases: a bidirectional Mendelian randomization. Eur Arch Otorhinolaryngol 280, 5615–5623 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00405-023-08246-9

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