The association between cognitive performance and meniscal injuries: A Mendelian randomization analysis

Abstract Background The causal relationship between cognitive performance and meniscal injuries is unclear. This study aims to elucidate the genetic causality between cognitive performance and meniscal injuries. Methods We conducted a two-sample Mendelian Randomization (MR) analysis utilizing summary-level data from extensive genome-wide association studies. Single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) achieving genome-wide significance (P < 5*10⁻ ⁸) were employed as instrumental variables for each exposure. The inverse-variance weighted (IVW) method served as the principal statistical technique, complemented by the weighted median, MR-Egger regression, and MR-PRESSO methods for sensitivity analyses, accommodating some of the assumptions inherent in IVs. Results Genetically predicted cognitive performance was inversely correlated with the odds of meniscal injuries. However, the MR-Egger regression analysis did not corroborate this association. The inverse-variance weighting (IVW) method yielded a pooled odds ratio(OR) of 0.76 (95% CI 0.66–0.88; P = 2*10⁻ ⁴) per standard deviation increase in the prevalence of cognitive performance, a finding echoed by the weighted median method(OR:0.81, 95% CI 0.67–0.98; P = 3*10⁻ ²).Additionally, we did not detect pleiotropy of effects in our investigation using the MR-Egger intercept and Cochran’s Q test(P > 0.05). But there is heterogeneity between them (P > 0.05). Conclusion This study used MR analysis to analyze and explore the genetic data, which showed that cognitive decline is a risk factor for meniscal injuries, and further studies on the mechanisms of the role between the two are needed in the future.