Causal association between childhood obesity and risk of neuroblastoma: a Mendelian randomization study

Abstract Background: Childhood obesity increased risk for cancer in adulthood，but no existing comprehensive Mendelian randomization (MR) studies have focused on how childhood obesity affects pediatric tumors. This study aimed to perform a MR analysis to assess the causal association between childhood obesity and neuroblastoma risk using publicly available genome-wide association studies (GWAS) summary statistics. Methods: Childhood obesity data and neuroblastoma data are from the IEU open GWAS project, which were subjected to MR analyses. In this study, the inverse variance weighting (IVW) method was used as the predominant analysis method and was complemented by MR-Egger, simple mode, weighted median and weighted mode methods. The MR-PRESSO method was utilized to identify horizontal pleiotropy and potential outliers. Results: This study indicated that childhood obesity rises the possibility of neuroblastoma, which was significant in the IVW [OR (95%CI), 1.209 (1.016–1.439), P = 0.033], MR-Egger [OR (95%CI), 2.889 (1.178–7.084), P = 0.046] and weighted-median [OR (95%CI), 1.302(1.038–1.632), P = 0.022] analyses, but nonsignificant in the simple mode [OR (95%CI), 1.331 (0.927–1.909), P = 0.152] and weighted mode [OR (95%CI), 1.357 (1.000–1.840), P = 0.078] analyses. No significant heterogeneity or potential pleiotropy was detected, and the possibility of weak IVs was also excluded. Conclusion: This study revealed that childhood obesity increases the risk of neuroblastoma.