Genetic link affirms type 1 diabetes raises risk for hypothyroidism
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Data from a Mendelian randomization analysis indicated a causal association between type 1 diabetes and hypothyroidism, leading researchers to recommend that people with type 1 diabetes undergo regular thyroid function tests.
“Our results were based on several Mendelian randomization methods, and there was consistency in the causal effect estimates, indicating that the findings are convincing,” Fuzhong Xue, PhD, associate director and professor in the department of epidemiology and biostatistics in the School of Public Health at Shandong University in Shandong, China, and colleagues wrote.
Researchers chose independent single-nucleotide polymorphisms linked to type 1 diabetes with genome-wide significance as instrumental variables from a large genome-wide association study of type 1 diabetes and analyzed these with hypothyroidism genome-wide significance summary statistics from the ThyroidOmics Consortium. They used the inverse-variance weighted (IVW) method as the primary analysis. Methods to confirm the results included Mendelian randomization (MR)-Egger, the weighted median method, MR-Robust and others.
Results revealed that type 1 diabetes was positively, causally associated with hypothyroidism (IVW OR = 1.083; 95% CI, 1.046-1.122; P < .001). In MR-Egger regression analysis, directional pleiotropy did not bias the outcome (intercept = 0.006; P = .295).
Furthermore, an independent validation set confirmed the causal association (IVW OR = 1.099; 95% CI, 1.018-1.186; P = .017). Various MR methods revealed the robustness of the findings, whereas the data from the reverse MR analysis failed to support reverse causation (P > .05), according to the researchers.
“We demonstrated that type 1 diabetes is an important risk factor for hypothyroidism, and there is a reasonable biological explanation,” the researchers wrote. “Therefore, it is recommended that patients with type 1 diabetes should perform thyroid function tests regularly, in order to minimize the risk of undiagnosed hypothyroidism in young patients with type 1 diabetes.”
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