Abstract
Background: Although some observational studies have shown that physical activity may have a positive relationship with cardiovascular diseases, the causal effect remains uncertain. We conducted a Mendelian randomization (MR) study to identify the potential causal effect between physical activity and cardiovascular diseases.Methods: Summary statistics of genome-wide association studies on four physical activity phenotypes and cardiovascular diseases were utilized. MR analysis was performed using inverse-variance weighted (IVW) and multivariable MR. Multiple sensitivity analysis was further conducted to identify the robustness of our results.Results: Genetically predicted self-reported vigorous physical activity (VPA) was significantly associated with lower risk of myocardial infarction (IVW OR: 0.24, 95% CI: 0.08–0.68, p-value: 0.007). Additionally, the causal effect of VPA with myocardial infarction was robust after adjusting for several cardiovascular risk factors through using the multivariable MR. There were no apparent causal associations between physical activity with other cardiovascular diseases. Results were consistent with the sensitivity analysis.Conclusion: The present study supports a protective role of self-reported vigorous physical activity in the initiation of myocardial infarction and highlights the importance of activity levels of physical activity. Further studies are required to elucidate the potential biological pathways of physical activity with cardiovascular diseases.
Highlights
Some observational studies have shown that physical activity may have a positive relationship with cardiovascular diseases, the causal effect remains uncertain
In the PhenoScanner database, we identified one of the nine SNPs for self-reported moderateto-vigorous physical activity associated with coronary artery disease and we excluded it from coronary artery disease and myocardial infarction analysis (Supplementary Table 4)
To explore the effect of potential cardiovascular risk factors on causal estimates, multivariable Mendelian randomization (MR) analysis was performed and the association of VPA with myocardial infarction was robust after adjusting for genetically predicted smoking, serum lipid levels, BMI, type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2D), or depression separately (Table 2)
Summary
Some observational studies have shown that physical activity may have a positive relationship with cardiovascular diseases, the causal effect remains uncertain. We conducted a Mendelian randomization (MR) study to identify the potential causal effect between physical activity and cardiovascular diseases. Previous studies have demonstrated that physical activity improves the Association of PA With CVDs prognosis of CVDs in both healthy participants and those with traditional risk factors [7,8,9]. Most of the evidence for these guidelines originates from observational studies, which cannot be used to identify the causality because of the possibility of confounding and reverse causation
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