Rheumatoid arthritis reduces the risk of colorectal cancer through immune inflammation mediation.

Abstract

There is a close relationship between immune-mediated inflammation and cancer, and there is still controversy over whether rheumatoid arthritis (RA) increases the risk of malignancy. We first used Mendelian randomization (MR) analysis to explore the potential causal relationship between RA and pan-cancer. And verify the effect of immune-mediated inflammation on cancer through intermediate MR analysis. Then we extracted the standardized incidence rate of malignancy in RA patients relative to the general population through large-scale meta-analysis. Finally, we performed pan-cancer analysis on the RA related genes obtained from MR analysis. And perform immune related analysis on key genes to reveal the association between RA and malignancy. The MR analysis demonstrated a negative correlation between RA and pan-cancer (p = 0.008). Autoimmune traits were the main mediating variable for the causal relationship between RA and pan-cancer. Based on the results of the meta-analysis, we validated that RA reduces the risk of developing colorectal cancer (SIR = 0.69, 95% CI 0.53-0.85). Pan-cancer analysis also showed that high expression of RA related genes was negatively correlated with colon adenocarcinoma. IL6R was the gene with the highest correlation among them, and its correlation with immune cells was higher in colorectal cancer than in other malignancy. Our MR study provides evidence that RA was associated with reduced risk of colorectal cancer. This effect is caused by immune-mediated inflammation, with IL6R being a key regulatory gene.