ArticleBMC musculoskeletal disorders2025
The causal impact of bioavailable testosterone levels on osteoarthritis: a bidirectional Mendelian randomized study.
Article in BMC musculoskeletal disorders, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 2 papers.
What it found
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Who cites it
2 citing papers in PubMed.
- Endocrine‑metabolic imbalance drives osteoarthritis: From whole‑joint pathobiology to precision therapy (Review).International journal of molecular medicine · 2026Review
- Advanced Biomaterial-Based In Vitro Osteoarthritis Models: Integrating Sex as a Biological Variable in Hormonal, Subchondral Bone, and Mechanobiological Pathways.Journal of functional biomaterials · 2026Review
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Authors and funding
7 authors.
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Abstract
backgroundIt has been shown that low testosterone levels are associated with the development of osteoarthritis (OA). In our study, we aimed to investigate a bidirectional causal relationship between bioavailable testosterone levels and OA using Mendelian randomization (MR) analysis.
methodsIn our study, the datasets from publicly available genome-wide association study (GWAS) were adopted, including the OA-related dataset (ukb-b-14486) and the bioavailable testosterone levels-related dataset (ebi-a-GCST90012104). The UKB-B-14,486 dataset contains 462,933 samples in total, including 38,472 OA samples, 424,461 control samples, and 9,851,867 SNPs, all collected from the European population in 2018. Additionally, the EBI-A-GCST90012104 dataset includes 382,988 samples and 16,137,327 SNPs, which reflect data from the European population in 2020. In total, five methods were utilized, namely MR Egger, Weighted median, Inverse variance weighted (IVW), Simple mode, and Weighted mode. Among them, IVW was the main analytical method. Additionally, the sensitivity analysis was carried out through the heterogeneity test, the horizontal pleiotropy test, and the Leave-One-Out (LOO) method.
resultsThe result of forward MR analysis demonstrated that bioavailable testosterone levels were considerably relevant to OA, and were a risk factor for OA (OR = 1.01, 95% CI: [1.00, 1.02], P = 0.02). However, through reverse MR analysis, we did not find a causal relationship between OA and bioavailable testosterone levels. Moreover, the results of the sensitivity analysis suggested that our results were reliable.
conclusionThe results of our study supported a causal relationship between bioavailable testosterone levels and OA.
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