ArticleThorax2024
Rheumatoid arthritis and idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis: a bidirectional Mendelian randomisation study.
Article in Thorax, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 20 papers, 2 of them syntheses that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
20 citing papers in PubMed, 2 syntheses or guidelines pooled it, 23 citations in OpenAlex.
- Risk factors for idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis: an umbrella review of meta-analyses and mendelian randomization analyses.BMC pulmonary medicine · 2026Pooled it
- Causal risk and protective factors for rheumatoid arthritis: a comprehensive mendelian randomization systematic review and meta-analysis.Frontiers in genetics · 2026Pooled it
- What Explains the Pattern of Fibrosis in Chronic Graft-Versus-Host Disease?Clinical transplantation · 2026Review
- Article
- Article
- Neutrophil degranulation in the lung microenvironment linked to idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis severity and survival.iScience · 2026Article
- An intricate relationship between fibrosis and autoimmune diseases: a specific focus on unraveling its molecular, immunological, and epigenetic drivers.Frontiers in immunology · 2026Review
- Clinical significance of radiological usual interstitial pneumonia pattern in primary Sjögren syndrome-associated interstitial lung disease.Frontiers in immunology · 2026Article
- Shared genetic architecture and potential comorbid mechanisms between rheumatoid arthritis and idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis.Clinical rheumatology · 2026Article
- Polygenic risk scores for rheumatoid arthritis and idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis and associations with RA, interstitial lung abnormalities, and quantitative interstitial abnormalities among smokers.Seminars in arthritis and rheumatism · 2025Article
- Mendelian randomization analysis and molecular mechanism study of childhood asthma and obstructive sleep apnea.Human genetics · 2025Article
- Navigating interstitial lung disease associated with rheumatoid arthritis (RA-ILD): from genetics to clinical landscape.Frontiers in medicine · 2025Review
- Exploring The Role of TOP2A in the Intersection of Pathogenic Mechanisms Between Rheumatoid Arthritis and Idiopathic Pulmonary Fibrosis Based on Bioinformatics.Journal of inflammation research · 2025Article
- Genomic and Serological Rheumatoid Arthritis Biomarkers,Annals of the American Thoracic Society · 2025Article
- Multi-Ancestry Causal Association between Rheumatoid Arthritis and Interstitial Lung Disease: A Bidirectional Two-Sample Mendelian Randomization Study.Journal of clinical medicine · 2024Article
- Multiple Pulmonary Involvement in the Rapidly Progressive Evolution of Rheumatoid Arthritis.Diagnostics (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Article
- [Diagnostic Value of Interleukin 6, Interleukin 12P70, Serum Amyloid A, and Procalcitonin for Rheumatoid Arthritis and Their Relationship With the Disease Activity].Sichuan da xue xue bao. Yi xue ban = Journal of Sichuan University. Medical science edition · 2024Article
- Neutrophil extracellular traps linked to idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis severity and survival.medRxiv : the preprint server for health sciences · 2024Article
- ERS International Congress 2023: highlights from the Interstitial Lung Diseases Assembly.ERJ open research · 2024Article
- Revealing the causal role of immune cells in malignant neoplasms of the head and neck: insights from Mendelian randomization.Frontiers in oncology · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
11 authors at 7 institutions in 4 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
backgroundA usual interstitial pneumonia (UIP) pattern of lung injury is a key feature of idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF) and is also observed in up to 40% of individuals with rheumatoid arthritis (RA)-associated interstitial lung disease (RA-ILD). The RA-UIP phenotype could result from either a causal relationship of RA on UIP or vice versa, or from a simple co-occurrence of RA and IPF due to shared demographic, genetic or environmental risk factors.
methodsWe used two-sample bidirectional Mendelian randomisation (MR) to test the hypothesis of a causal effect of RA on UIP and of UIP on RA, using variants from genome-wide association studies (GWAS) of RA (separately for seropositive (18 019 cases and 991 604 controls) and seronegative (8515 cases and 1 015 471 controls) RA) and of IPF (4125 cases and 20 464 controls) as genetic instruments. Sensitivity analyses were conducted to assess the robustness of the results to violations of the MR assumptions.
findingsIPF showed a significant causal effect on seropositive RA, with developing IPF increasing the risk of seropositive RA (OR=1.06, 95% CI: 1.04 to 1.08, p<0.001) which was robust under all models. For the MR in the other direction, seropositive RA showed a significant protective effect on IPF (OR=0.93; 95% CI: 0.87 to 0.99; p=0.032), but the effect was not significant when sensitivity analyses were applied. This was likely because of bias due to exclusion of patients with RA from among the cases in the IPF GWAS, or possibly because our genetic instruments did not fully capture the effect of the complex human leucocyte antigen region, the strongest RA genetic risk factor.
interpretationOur findings support the hypothesis that RA-UIP may be due to a cause-effect relationship between UIP and RA, rather than due to a coincidental occurrence of IPF in patients with RA. The significant causal effect of IPF on seropositive RA suggests that pathomechanisms involved in the development of UIP may promote RA, and this may help inform future guidelines on screening for ILD in patients with RA.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.