The causal relationship between hypertension and coronary heart disease: a bidirectional two sample Mendelian randomization analysis

A bidirectional two sample Mendelian randomization (MR) analysis was used to explore the causal relationship between hypertension and coronary heart disease. The datasets were selected from the IEU open GWAS project website. The sample size of hypertension dataset was 461880 cases, and that of coronary heart disease dataset was 184305 cases. The causal relationship between hypertension and coronary heart disease was analyzed with the help of packages such as “TwoSampleMR” of R software. This study mainly analyzed the results using the inverse variance weighted method (IVW), supplemented by MR Egger regression, simple mode, weighted mode, and weighted median analysis. A series of validation analyses including heterogeneity, pleiotropy, and sensitivity were performed. The IVW analysis results of the forward MR analysis showed that hypertension could increase the risk of coronary heart disease (or = 1.021, 95% CI (1.003-1.040), P < 0.05); the IVW analysis results of the reverse MR analysis showed that coronary heart disease could also increase the risk of hypertension (or = 5.888, 95% CI (4.372-7.930), P < 0.001). The results of other Mendelian randomization methods were basically the same, and the sensitivity analysis results proved that the above results were reliable. It can be seen that hypertension can increase the risk of coronary heart disease, and coronary heart disease can also increase the risk of hypertension. The two are mutually causal.