Causal associations between lifestyle habits and risk of benign prostatic hyperplasia: a two-sample Mendelian randomization study.

Benign prostatic hyperplasia (BPH) most often occurs in older men,previous studies and clinical experience suggest a potential link between lifestyle habits such as sleep habits, sedentary behaviour, exercise levels and BPH, but whether they have a clear causal relationship and the direction of that causality is unclear. We aimed to investigate the causal relationship between lifestyle habits and BPH using two-sample Mendelian randomization (MR) analysis.

Instrumental genetic independent variables strongly associated with the selected exposure factors were filtered from published genome-wide association studies (GWAS) consisting primarily of European ancestry samples. GWAS from BPH was analysed as an MR outcome with the inverse variance weighted method (IVW), maximum likelihood, weighted median method, MR‒Egger regression, and several sensitivity analyses, including Cochran's Q test, intercept of MR‒Egger, and MR pleiotropy residual sum and outlier test (MR-PRESSO).

MR analysis showed a significant causal risk relationship between sleep duration and BPH, with an odds ratio (OR) of 0.42 (95% confidence interval (CI), 0.25-0.69, p=0.001) for BPH when sleep duration was increased by one standard deviation (SD), but we did not find a causal relationship between the two when we performed a reverse analysis. However, sedentary behaviour and different levels of exercise did not significantly affect the risk of BPH.

This study showed a strong causal relationship between sleep levels and BPH, with adequate sleep duration being a protective factor for BPH.

The journals of gerontology. Series A, Biological sciences and medical sciences. 2023 Aug 01 [Epub ahead of print]

Fan Jia, Zhitao Wei, Xiangrui Kong, Yinhui Mao, Yong Yang

Department of Urology, The Third Affiliated Hospital of Jinzhou Medical University, Jinzhou, Liaoning, PR China., Department of Urology, The Affiliated Hospital of the Changchun University of Chinese Medicine, Changchun, Jilin, PR China.