Mendelian Randomization Analysis Reveals Causal Relationship Between Obstetric-related Diseases and COVID-19

Background: Several observational studies demonstrated that pregnant individuals with COVID-19 had a higher risk of preeclampsia and preterm birth. We aimed to determine whether women with COVID-19 diagnosis had adverse pregnancy outcomes. Methods: : A two-sample Mendelian randomization (MR) analysis in this study was used to evaluate the casual relationships between COVID-19 infection and obstetric-related diseases based on genome-wide association studies (GWAS) dataset. Inverse-variance weighted (IVW), MR-Egger and MR-PRESSO were used to infer the connection and estimate the pleiotropy respectively. Results: : The significant connection was observed between COVID-19 and placental disorders with beta IVW of 1.57 and odds ratio of 4.81 (95% confidence interval [CI]:1.05-22.05, p =0.04). However, there were no associations between COVID-19 infection and gestational diabetes mellitus (GDM) (OR= 1.12; 95% CI:0.85-1.45, p =0.41), other disorders of amniotic fluid and membranes (OR= 0.90; 95% CI:0.61-1.32, p =0.59), Intrahepatic Cholestasis of Pregnancy (ICP) (OR= 1.42; 95% CI:0.85-2.36, p =0.18), birth weight (OR= 1.02; 95% CI:0.99-1.05, p =0.19), gestational hypertension (OR= 1.00; 95% CI:1.00-1.00, p =0.85), spontaneous miscarriages (OR= 1.00; 95% CI:0.96-1.04, p =0.90) and stillbirth (OR= 1.00; 95% CI:0.98-1.01, p =0.62). Conclusion: There was no direct causal relationship between COVID-19 infection and maternal and neonatal poor outcomes. Our study could alleviate the anxiety of pregnant women under the COVID-19 pandemic conditions partly.