Associations Between Lipid Traits and Breast Cancer Risk: A Mendelian Randomization Study in African Women

Backgrounds Blood lipids are associated with breast cancer. An increasing number of reports have attempted to explore the genetic connection between blood lipids and the risk of developing breast cancer. However, observational studies can be affected by confounding factors and reverse causation, which can compromise the reliability of the findings. Methods We used univariate and multivariable two-sample mendelian randomization to explore the causal association between blood lipids and breast cancer. Summary-level data for lipid traits were obtained from the Africa Wits-INDEPTH partnership for Genomic Research (AWI-Gen) (N = 10,603, 58.5% of women). For breast cancer, we leveraged summary statistics from the most comprehensive Genome-wide Association Studies (GWAS) on breast cancer consisting of 18,034 cases and 22,104 controls of women of African ancestry. Results Our analysis suggests that genetically predicted triglycerides had a potential protective effect on breast carcinoma (OR = 0.73, 95% CI = 0.56, 0.95, FDR = 0.001). We found no evidence that genetically elevated levels of TC, HDL, and LDL may be associated with the risk of breast cancer TC (OR = 1.04; 95% CI, 0.93, 1.18; FDR  = 0.029); HDL (OR = 1.29, 95% CI = 0.93, 1.79, FDR = 0.008); LDL (OR = 1.04, 95% CI = 0.90, 1.20, FDR = 0.036). Multivariate mendelian randomization analysis, which adjusted for the effects of TG, TC, LDL, and HDL, attenuated the observation of TG and breast cancer and also found no relationship between TC, HDL, LDL, and breast cancers. Furthermore, there was no evidence for a causal association between lipid traits and breast cancer subtypes. Our findings were robust in several sensitivity analyses. Conclusions This study provides strong evidence that circulating TG may be associated with a decreased risk of breast cancer, while TC, LDL and HDL may not be related to the risk of breast cancer among African women. Our findings align with both observational and MR studies conducted in European populations. However, in contrast to our results, some studies suggest that TG, LDL, and HDL may increase breast cancer risk in Europeans, indicating potential ethnic differences in the lipid profiles of breast cancer patients.