Leisure screen time and diabetic retinopathy risk: A Mendelian randomization study

The aim of this study was to investigate whether leisure screen time (LST) increases the risk of diabetic retinopathy (DR) using the Mendelian randomization (MR). This study employed a two-sample MR analysis, utilizing 63 single-nucleotide polymorphisms as instrumental variables (IVs) to assess the causal relationship between LST and the risk of Dr. To ensure the robustness of the results, a multi-effect test was conducted to evaluate the validity of the IVs. Additionally, heterogeneity tests were performed to explore differences among sub-samples. Sensitivity analyses were also conducted to further validate our findings. The impact of LST on the risk of DR was observed in both inverse variance weighted (odds ratio [OR]: 1.22, 95% confidence interval [CI]: 1.04-1.43, P = 1.38 × 10-2) and weighted median (OR: 1.30, 95% CI: 1.05-1.61, P = 1.46 × 10-2) analyses. However, the MR-Egger method (OR: 0.66, 95% CI: 0.32-1.36, P = .273) did not find an increased risk of DR with increased LST. The pleiotropy test yielded a P-value of P = .09. Heterogeneity tests showed that the Q value for the inverse variance weighted method was 71.39 with a P-value of 0.17, indicating no significant heterogeneity. These results suggest that the IVs might be appropriate, and the analysis results could be robust. A large-scale MR analysis suggests a causal relationship between LST and the risk of Dr.