Associations between vitamin D and autoimmune diseases: Mendelian randomization analysis

OBJECTIVE: The VITAL trial of vitamin D supplementation suggested a possible protective effect for autoimmune diseases but uncertainties remain. We investigated potential causal effects of vitamin D on composite and individual autoimmune diseases using Mendelian randomization. METHODS: We used data from 332,984 participants of the UK Biobank of whom 23,089 had at least one autoimmune disease defined using ICD code and/or self-report. Diseases were further considered in mechanistic subgroups driven by “autoimmunity” (n=12,774) or “autoinflammation” (n=11,164), then individually. We selected variants within gene regions implicated in vitamin D biology to generate a weighted genetic score. We performed population-wide analysis using the ratio method, then examined non-linear effects across five quantiles based on 25-hydroxycholecalciferol levels. RESULTS: Genetically-predicted vitamin D was associated with lower risk of diseases in the autoinflammation group (OR 0.95 per 10ng/ml increase in 25-hydroxycholecalciferol; 95%CI 0.91-0.99; p=0.03) but not the autoimmunity group (OR 0.99; 95%CI 0.95-1.03; p=0.64) or combined. When considering individual diseases, genetically-predicted vitamin D was associated with lower risk of psoriasis (OR 0.91; 95%CI 0.85-0.97; p=0.005), the most common disease in the autoinflammation group, and suggestively with systemic lupus erythematosus (OR 0.84; 95%CI 0.69-1.02; p=0.08); results were replicated using data from independent studies. We found no evidence for a plausible non-linear relationship between vitamin D and any outcome. CONCLUSIONS: We found genetic evidence to support a causal link between 25-hydroxycholecalciferol concentrations and psoriasis and systemic lupus erythematosus. These results have implications for potential disease prevention strategies, and the interpretation and design of vitamin D supplementation trials.