Causal relationship between breakfast skipping and bone mineral density: a two-sample Mendelian randomized study

Jinsheng Yu; Chen Zhuang; Wenxuan Guo; Xing Zhou; Yixuan Chen; Likang Wang; Wenkai Li; Yiwen Zhu; Rujie Zhuang; Kun Tian

doi:10.3389/fendo.2023.1200892

Causal relationship between breakfast skipping and bone mineral density: a two-sample Mendelian randomized study

Front Endocrinol (Lausanne). 2023 Nov 7:14:1200892. doi: 10.3389/fendo.2023.1200892. eCollection 2023.

Authors

Jinsheng Yu^#¹, Chen Zhuang^#², Wenxuan Guo^#³, Xing Zhou¹, Yixuan Chen¹, Likang Wang¹, Wenkai Li¹, Yiwen Zhu¹, Rujie Zhuang³, Kun Tian³

Affiliations

¹ The First School of Clinical Medicine, Zhejiang Chinese Medical University, Hangzhou, Zhejiang, China.
² Alberta Institute, Wenzhou Medical University, Wenzhou, China.
³ Orthopedic Department, The First Affiliated Hospital of Zhejiang Chinese Medical University (Zhejiang Provincial Hospital of Traditional Chinese Medicine), Hangzhou, China.

^# Contributed equally.

Abstract

Objective: To explore the causal association between breakfast skipping and bone mineral density (BMD) through two-sample Mendelian randomisation (MR) analysis.

Methods: A two-sample MR approach was adopted to explore the causal relationship of breakfast skipping with BMDs (across three skeletal sites and five age groups). Publicly available genome-wide association study summary data were used for MR analysis. We used five methods to estimate the causal associations between breakfast skipping and BMDs: inverse-variance weighting (IVW), MR-Egger, weighted median, simple mode, and weighted mode. IVW was used for the main analysis and the remaining four methods were used as supplementary analyses. The heterogeneity of the MR results was determined using IVW and MR-Egger methods. The pleiotropy of the MR results was determined using MR-Egger intercept. Furthermore, a leave-one-out test was performed to determine whether the MR results were affected by a single nucleotide polymorphism.

Results: With the IVW method, we did not find any causal relationship between breakfast skipping and forearm, femoral neck, and lumbar spine BMD. Subsequently, when we included BMD data stratified by five different age groups in the analysis, the results showed that there was no apparent causal effect between breakfast skipping and age-stratified BMD. This finding was supported by all four supplementary methods (P > 0.05 for all methods). No heterogeneity or horizontal pleiotropy was detected in any of the analyses (P > 0.05). The leave-one-out tests conducted in the analyses did not identify any single nucleotide polymorphism that could have influenced the MR results, indicating the reliability of our findings.

Conclusion: No causal effect was found between breakfast skipping and BMD (across three skeletal sites and five age groups).

Keywords: Mendelian randomization; bone mineral density; breakfast skipping; causal relationship; genetics.

Publication types

Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

Bone Density* / genetics
Breakfast*
Causality
Genome-Wide Association Study
Mendelian Randomization Analysis
Reproducibility of Results

Grants and funding

This work was supported by the national administration of traditional Chinese medicine, science and technology department and Zhejiang administration of traditional Chinese medicine, Jointly-funded program (Grant number: GZY-ZJ-KJ-23040).