Dietary intake and incidence risk of idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis: a Mendelian randomization study

BACKGROUND: Dietary intake has been shown to have a causal relationship with various lung diseases, such as lung cancer and asthma. However, the causal relationship between dietary intake and idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF) remains unclear. We conducted a two-sample Mendelian Randomization (MR) study to investigate the causal relationship between dietary intake and IPF. METHODS: The exposure datasets included meat, fruit, vegetable, and beverage intake from the UK Biobank. IPF data came from the EBI database of 451,025 individuals. All data in this study were obtained from the IEU Open GWAS Project. The inverse variance weighted (IVW), MR-Egger, and weighted median methods were used as the primary methods. Sensitivity analyses were performed to ensure the validity of the results. RESULTS: Oily fish intake [odds ratio (OR):0.995; 95% confidence interval (CI): 0.993–0.998; p = 6.458E-05] and Dried fruit intake (OR:0.995;95%CI:0.991–0.998; p = 0.001) were discovered as protective factors. There was also a suggestive correlation between Beef intake (OR:1.006;95%Cl:1.001–1.012; p = 0.023) and IPF. Sensitivity analysis did not reveal any contradictory results. No causal relationship was found between IPF and the rest of the dietary exposures. CONCLUSIONS: Our study found that Oily fish and Dried fruit intake were associated with the risk of IPF, while Beef intake was suggestively associated with the risk of IPF. Other studies are still needed to confirm the results in the future. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12890-023-02673-4.