Zachary Geyer
Research Mentor(s): Xiang Zhou
Mentor Department: Biostatistics
Authors: Zachary Geyer, Jinju Li, Xiang Zhou
Session: Session 6 (3:00pm – 3:50pm)
Presentation Type: Poster 100
Abstract
Abstract: Previous studies have indicated that viral infections affecting the respiratory tract may increase the risk of acute coronary syndromes. One potential mechanism for type 1 acute myocardial infarction (AMI) involves a pro-inflammatory state, which can contribute to the destabilization of atherosclerotic plaques in the coronary arteries. This study utilizes Mendelian randomization (MR) to investigate the causal relationship between COVID-19 and the occurrence of acute myocardial infarction (AMI). Three different datasets of COVID-19 were used: COVID-19 in the general population, COVID-19 cases that led to hospitalization, and cases that were designated as severe. MR, which leverages genetic variants as instrumental variables to assess causal relationships, allows for the examination of the effect of COVID-19 infection on AMI risk, minimizing confounding and reverse causation. To ensure robustness and address potential biases, we apply several MR techniques, including the inverse-variance weighted (IVW) method, weighted median method, and MR-Egger regression. In addition, we perform sensitivity analyses, the “leave-one-out” method, which assesses the influence of each individual genetic variant on the overall causal estimate, and heterogeneity tests to detect any pleiotropy or inconsistencies in the instruments. These sensitivity analyses help confirm the reliability of the results and strengthen the evidence for a direct causal link between COVID-19 infection and the increased risk of AMI. Our results indicated that there is sufficient evidence to indicate the contraction of COVID-19 in the general population is causally associated with an increased risk of AMI (sample size = 1, p-value = .0002 in MR-Egger). There was insufficient evidence to causally associate hospitalized (sample size = 22, p-value = .1652 in MR-Egger) or severe (sample size = 18, p-value = .0925 in MR-Egger) COVID-19 with this increased risk. Our findings suggest that among all people, the contraction of COVID-19 increases the likelihood of developing AMI. However, this association is not statistically significant in COVID-19 cases that were severe or led to hospitalization.
