The causal relationship between sleep traits and the risk of schizophrenia: a two-sample bidirectional Mendelian randomization study

BACKGROUND: Observational studies suggest that sleep disturbances are commonly associated with schizophrenia. However, it is uncertain whether this relationship is causal. To investigate the bidirectional causal relation between sleep traits and schizophrenia, we performed a two-sample bidirectional Mendelian randomization (MR) study with the fixed effects inverse-variance weighted (IVW) method. METHODS: As genetic variants for sleep traits, we selected variants from each meta-analysis of genome-wide association studies (GWASs) conducted using data from the UK Biobank (UKB). RESULTS: We found that morning diurnal preference was associated with a lower risk of schizophrenia, while long sleep duration and daytime napping were associated with a higher risk of schizophrenia. Multivariable MR analysis also showed that sleep duration was associated with a higher risk of schizophrenia after adjusting for other sleep traits. Furthermore, genetically predicted schizophrenia was negatively associated with morning diurnal preference and short sleep duration and was positively associated with daytime napping and long sleep duration. CONCLUSIONS: Therefore, sleep traits were identified as a potential treatment target for patients with schizophrenia. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12888-022-03946-8.