The potential causal association between aspirin consumption and the risk of prostate cancer incidence: a Mendelian randomization analysis

Abstract Background Currently, the potential link between aspirin use and the development of prostate cancer remains uncertain. The purpose of this study using two-sample Mendelian randomization (MR) was to elucidate the causal effect of aspirin use on prostate cancer (PCa) risk. Methods This study included pooled statistics from two Genome-Wide Association Study (GWAS), one for aspirin use (61583 cases and 50427 control) and the other for PCa of European descent (22534 cases and 270176 control). Inverse variance weighting (IVW) was used as the main method, MR-Egger method, weighted median method and weighted model method were used to evaluate the causal relationship between aspirin use and PCa risk. Cochran's Q test was used to check the heterogeneity, and the MR-Egger intercept test was used to analyze the horizontal pleotropy of the results, and a residual analysis was carried out to confirm the robustness and reliability of the results. Results Inverse variance weighting was used to infer that aspirin use had a protective effect on reducing the incidence of PCa (OR = 0.986, 95% CI = 0.978–0.994, P = 0.001). Sensitivity analysis showed that pleiotropy and heterogeneity were not observed. Furthermore, the remain-one analysis showed that the survey results were not significantly affected by any instrumental variable. Conclusion There is a causal relationship between aspirin use and the development of PCa, that is, aspirin use reduces the risk of PCa.