Systemic Inflammatory Regulators and Risk of Chronic Periodontitis: A Two-Sample Mendelian Randomization Study

Background To investigate the bidirectional causal relationship between systemic inflammatory regulators and chronic periodontitis. Methods We conducted a bidirectional two-sample Mendelian randomization (MR) study of the relationship between systemic inflammatory modifiers and chronic periodontitis using inverse variance weighting, weighted median, and MR‒Egger regression. The GWAS data included information on 41 inflammatory regulators in 8293 individuals and chronic periodontitis in 456,348 individuals (950 cases and 455398 controls). Results Increased systemic granulocyte colony-stimulating factor (GCSF) levels were found to be a risk factor for chronic periodontitis (odds ratio = 1.564, 95% confidence interval = (1.137, 2.150), P = 0.006), and chronic periodontitis resulted in decreased systemic stem cell growth factor beta (SCGFb) levels (beta = − 0.11, 95% confidence interval = (− 0.18, − 0.04), P = 0.001). Conclusions Our results suggest a potential causal relationship between elevated GCSF levels and an increased risk of chronic periodontitis, as well as a possible causal relationship between an increased risk of chronic periodontitis and elevated SCGFb levels.