Inflammatory cytokines and oral lichen planus: a Mendelian randomization study

BackgroundInflammatory cytokines have long been considered closely related to the development of oral lichen planus (OLP), and we further explored the causal relationship between the two by Mendelian randomization (MR) method.MethodsWe performed bidirectional MR analyses by large genome-wide association studies (GWAS). The data included a large-scale OLP dataset, as well as datasets of 41 inflammatory cytokines. All data were obtained from the University of Bristol database, which includes 41 inflammatory cytokines, and the GWAS Catalog database, which includes 91 inflammatory cytokines. OLP data were obtained from the Finngen database, which includes 6411 cases and 405770 healthy controls. We used the inverse variance weighted (IVW) method, MR-Egger method, weighted median method, simple mode method and weighted mode method to analyze the causal relationship between inflammatory cytokines and OLP, and we also combined with sensitivity analysis to further verify the robustness of the results. We performed a meta-analysis of positive or potentially positive results for the same genes to confirm the reliability of the final results.ResultsWe primarily used the IVW analysis method, corrected using the Benjamin Hochberg (BH) method. When p