Birth weight is not causally associated with adult asthma: results from instrumental variable analyses

The association between lower birth weight and childhood asthma is well established. However, it remains unclear whether the influence of lower birth weight on asthma can persist into adulthood. We conducted a Mendelian randomization analysis to assess the causal relationship of birth weight (~140,000 individuals) on the risk of adult asthma (~62,000 individuals). We estimated the causal effect of birth weight to be 1.00 (95% CI 0.98~1.03, p = 0.737) using the genetic risk score method. We did not observe nonlinear relationship or gender difference for the estimated causal effect. With the inverse-variance weighted method, the causal effect of birth weight on adult asthma was estimated to be 1.02 (95% CI 0.84~1.24, p = 0.813). Additionally, the iMAP method provides no additional genome-wide evidence supporting the causal effects of birth weight on adult asthma. Our results were robust against various sensitivity analyses, and MR-PRESSO and MR-Egger regression showed that no instrument outliers and no horizontal pleiotropy were likely to bias the results. Overall, our study provides no evidence for the fetal origins of diseases hypothesis for adult asthma, implying that the impact of birth weight on asthma in years of children and adolescents does not persist into adult and previous findings may be biased by confounders.