Search resultsAlcohol consumption and diabetes risk in a Chinese population: a Mendelian randomization analysis.
AIM: To assess the causality between alcohol intake, diabetes risk and related traits.
DESIGN: Mendelian randomization (MR) study. Subgroup analysis, standard instrumental variable analysis and local average treatment effect (LATE) methods were applied to assess linear and nonlinear causality.
SETTING: China PARTICIPANTS: 4536 participants, including 721 diabetes cases.
FINDINGS: Carriage of an ALDH2 rs671 A allele reduced alcohol consumption by 44.63% (95% CI:-49.44%, -39.37%). In males, additional carriage of an A allele was significantly connected to decreased diabetes risk for the overall population (OR=0.716, 95% CI:0.567 to 0.904, P=0.005) or moderate drinkers (OR=0.564, 95% CI:0.355 to 0.894, P=0.015). In IV analysis, increasing alcohol consumption by 1.7-fold was associated with an incidence-rate ratio of 1.32 (95% CI: 1.06 to 1.67, P=0.014) for diabetes risk, and elevated alcohol intake was causally connected to natural log-transformed fasting, 2-h postload plasma glucose (β=0.036, 95% CI: 0.018-0.054; β=0.072, 95% CI: 0.035-0.108), and insulin resistance (HOMA-IR) (β=0.104, 95% CI: 0.039-0.169) but was not associated with beta-cell function (HOMA-BETA). In addition, the LATE method did not identify significant U-shaped causality between alcohol consumption and diabetes-related traits. In females, the effects of alcohol intake on all the outcomes were nonsignificant.
CONCLUSION: Among men in China, higher alcohol intake appears to be causally associated with increased diabetes risk and worsened related traits, even for moderate drinkers. This study found no significant U-shaped causality between alcohol consumption and diabetes-related traits.