Evaluating the Causal Effects of Gestational Diabetes Mellitus, Heart Disease, and High Body Mass Index on Maternal Alzheimer’s Disease and Dementia: Multivariable Mendelian Randomization

Introduction: Gestational diabetes mellitus (GDM), heart disease (HD) and high body mass index (BMI) are strongly related to Alzheimer’s disease (AD) dementia in pregnant women. Therefore, we aimed to determine the total effects of GDM, heart disease, and high BMI on maternal AD dementia. Methods: We used data from the genome-wide association studies of European populations including more than 30,000 participants. We performed two-sample Mendelian randomization (MR) and multivariable MR (MVMR) to systematically estimate the direct effects of GDM, HD, and high BMI on maternal AD and dementia. Multiple sensitivity analyses involving classical MR approaches and expanded MR-pleiotropy residual sum and outlier analysis. Results: In two-sample MR analysis, the inverse-variance weighted method in our study demonstrated no significant causality between GDM and maternal dementia (β = −0.006 ± 0.0026, p = 0.82). This method also revealed no significant causality between high BMI and maternal dementia (β = 0.0024 ± 0.0043, p = 0.57), and it was supported by the MR-Egger regression results, which showed no causal effect of high BMI on maternal Alzheimer’s disease and dementia (β = 0.0027 ± 0.0096, p = 0.78). The IVW method showed no significant causal relationship between maternal HD and maternal Alzheimer’s disease and dementia (β = −0.05 ± 0.0042, p = 0.117) and MR-Egger regression analysis gave a similar result (β = −0.12 ± 0.0060, p = 0.079). In MVMR analysis, we found no significant causal relationship between GDM, high BMI, or HD and maternal Alzheimer’s disease and dementia (p = 0.94, 0.82, and 0.13, respectively). Thus, the MVMR estimates were consistent with our results from the two-sample MR analysis. We confirmed that these results showed no horizontal pleiotropy and enhanced the robustness of our results through multiple sensitivity analyses. Conclusion: In two-sample MR analysis, we found no significant causal relationship between GDM, HD, high BMI and maternal AD and dementia. These results differed from previous observational studies showing HD is a significant predictor of dementia. MVMR analysis supported no significant causal relationship between GDM, HD, high BMI and maternal AD and dementia. Sensitivity analysis broadly increased the robustness of two-sample MR and MVMR analysis results.