Ovarian Cancer and Parkinson’s Disease: A Bidirectional Mendelian Randomization Study

Abstract

(1) Background: Ovarian cancer (OC) and Parkinson’s disease (PD) represent a huge public health burden. The relationship of these two diseases is suggested in the literature while not fully understood. To better understand this relationship, we conducted a bidirectional Mendelian ran-domization analysis using genetic markers as a proxy. (2) Methods: Utilizing single nucleotide polymorphisms associated with PD risk, we assessed the association between genetically predicted PD and OC risk, overall and by histotypes, using summary statistics from previously conducted genome-wide association studies of OC within the Ovarian Cancer Association Consortium. Similarly, we assessed the association between genetically predicted OC and PD risk. The inverse variance weighted method was used as the main method to estimate odds ratios (OR) and 95% confidence intervals (CI) for the associations of interest. (3) Results: There was no significant association between genetically predicted PD and OC risk: OR = 0.95 (95% CI: 0.88–1.03), or between genetically predicted OC and PD risk: OR = 0.80 (95% CI: 0.61–1.06). On the other hand, when examined by histotypes, a suggestive inverse association was observed between genetically predicted high grade serous OC and PD risk: OR = 0.91 (95% CI: 0.84–0.99). (4) Conclusions: Overall, our study did not observe a strong genetic association between PD and OC, but the observed potential association between high grade serous OC and reduced PD risk warrants further investigation.