Stress urinary incontinence (SUI) is characterized by involuntary urine leakage in response to increased abdominal pressure, such as coughing, laughing, or sneezing. It significantly affects women's quality of life and imposes a substantial disease burden. While pregnancy and childbirth have been previously identified as risk factors for SUI, educational attainment may also play a role. Therefore, this paper investigates the causal relationship between educational attainment and SUI using two-sample Mendelian randomization (TSMR) analysis, years of schooling (YOS), and college or university degree (CUD) as proxies.
Summary statistics of YOS, CUD, and SUI were obtained from genome-wide association studies (GWAS), and TSMR analysis was applied to explore potential causal relationships between them. Causal effects were mainly estimated using the standard inverse variance weighting (IVW) method, and complementary and sensitivity analyses were also performed using multiple methods.
The results indicate that both YOS (OR = 0.994, 95% CI: 0.992-0.996; P = 7.764E-10) and CUD (OR = 0.987, 95% CI: 0.983-0.991; P = 1.217E-09) may have a negative causal effect on SUI.
Improving educational attainment may go some way towards reducing the risk of SUI. Therefore, it is important to increase efforts to improve the imbalance in educational development and safeguard women's health.
BMC women's health. 2023 Nov 02*** epublish ***
Shufei Zhang, Mao Chen, Jianfeng Liu, Lian Yang, Hanyue Li, Li Hong
Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, Renmin Hospital of Wuhan University, Wuhan, Hubei Province, 430060, People's Republic of China., Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, Renmin Hospital of Wuhan University, Wuhan, Hubei Province, 430060, People's Republic of China. .