ArticleBMC cancer2025
Causality between insulin use and malignant tumors of the digestive system: a two-sample mendelian randomized study.
Article in BMC cancer, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 1 paper.
What it found
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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.
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Who cites it
1 citing paper in PubMed.
- Pharmacological mechanisms and clinical impacts of antidiabetic drugs on colorectal cancer risk: a systematic review.Frontiers in pharmacology · 2026Review
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Authors and funding
7 authors.
Funding
Abstract
backgroundExisting cohort studies show no association between insulin use and cancers of the digestive system, while numerous meta-analyses suggest that insulin use increases the risk of digestive system tumours. This study uses two-sample Mendelian randomization (MR) to further investigate the causal relationship between the two.
methodsWe selected single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) strongly associated with insulin use as instrumental variables and used aggregated statistics on digestive system neoplasms as the outcome event. The primary method of analysis was inverse variance weighting (IVW), supplemented by weighted median, MR-Egger regression, weighted mode and simple mode methods. The reliability of the study was assessed by heterogeneity testing, pleiotropy analysis and sensitivity analysis.
resultA total of 8 SNPs associated with insulin use were included as instrumental variables. Random-effects IVW analysis showed an association between insulin use and increased risk of colorectal cancer (OR = 1.1037, 95%CI = 1.0183-1.1962, P = 0.016). No statistically significant association was found between insulin use and the development of other digestive system tumours. The results were unaffected by pleiotropy and heterogeneity, and the reliability of the findings was confirmed by sensitivity analysis.
conclusionOur Mendelian randomization study suggests an association between insulin use and an increased risk of CRC, with no clear association observed for other digestive system tumours. However, further MR studies with larger sample sizes from genome-wide association study (GWAS) data are needed to verify this association.
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