ArticleFrontiers in neurology2024
Genetics of causal relationships between circulating inflammatory proteins and postherpetic neuralgia: a bidirectional Mendelian randomization study.
Article in Frontiers in neurology, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 3 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
3 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Effects of pulsed radiofrequency combined with ozone on zoster-associated pain: a systematic review and meta-analysis.Medical gas research · 2026Pooled it
- Dissecting the Causal Pathway from Herpes Zoster to Postherpetic Neuralgia: A Multi-Stage Mendelian Randomization Study Implicating VZV-Specific IgE and Cerebrospinal Fluid Metabolites.Journal of pain research · 2026Article
- Mechanism of electrothermal acupuncture in alleviating postherpetic neuralgia.Frontiers in neurologyArticle
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
6 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Objective: According to data from several observational studies, there is a strong association between circulating inflammatory cytokines and postherpetic neuralgia (PHN), but it is not clear whether this association is causal or confounding; therefore, the main aim of the present study was to analyze whether circulating inflammatory proteins have a bidirectional relationship with PHN at the genetic inheritance level using a Mendelian randomization (MR) study. Methods: The Genome-Wide Association Study (GWAS) database was used for our analysis. We gathered data on inflammation-related genetic variation from three GWASs of human cytokines. These proteins included 91 circulating inflammatory proteins, tumor necrosis factor-alpha (TNF-α), macrophage inflammatory protein 1b (MIP-1b), and CXC chemokine 13 (CXCL13). The PHN dataset was obtained from the FinnGen biobank analysis round 5, and consisted of 1,413 cases and 275,212 controls. We conducted a two-sample bidirectional MR study using the TwoSampleMR and MRPRESSO R packages (version R.4.3.1). Our main analytical method was inverse variance weighting (IVW), and we performed sensitivity analyses to assess heterogeneity and pleiotropy, as well as the potential influence of individual SNPs, to validate our findings. Results: According to our forward analysis, five circulating inflammatory proteins were causally associated with the development of PHN: interleukin (IL)-18 was positively associated with PHN, and IL-13, fibroblast growth factor 19 (FGF-19), MIP-1b, and stem cell growth factor (SCF) showed reverse causality with PHN. Conversely, we found that PHN was closely associated with 12 inflammatory cytokines, but no significant correlation was found among the other inflammatory factors. Among them, only IL-18 had a bidirectional causal relationship with PHN. Conclusion: Our research advances the current understanding of the role of certain inflammatory biomarker pathways in the development of PHN. Additional verification is required to evaluate the viability of these proteins as targeted inflammatory factors for PHN-based treatments.
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