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- Published on: 19 June 2023
- Correspondence on “Increased risk of osteoarthritis in patients with atopic disease” by Baker et al.Published on: 19 May 2023
- Published on: 16 April 2023
- Published on: 19 June 2023Correspondence on “Increased risk of osteoarthritis in patients with atopic disease” by “Baker et al.”
Recently, we have been very interested in the article: "Increased risk of osteoarthritis in patients with atopic disease" by Baker et al. [1]. In this article, the author analyzed the incidence of OA in patients with atopic disease in two databases, suggesting that the immune response to atopic illness contributes to the increased incidence of OA. This study provides a new direction for immunotherapy against OA.
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Overall, the authors' research design is meticulous. In two different databases, the author divided the idiopathic disease exposure group and the non-exposed group. The author strictly stipulated the sequence of idiopathic diseases and OA to ensure the impact of idiopathic diseases on OA. Matching was performed for age, sex, race/ethnicity, education level, Charlson comorbidity score, follow-up time, and clinic visit frequency, effectively reducing these factors influence. Furthermore, OA risk was reduced after adjusting for BMI in the STARR cohort, confirming that BMI is an independent confounding factor. However, although the authors analyzed various limitations of this study in the Discussion section, there are still some unmentioned issues worth considering.
First, to reduce the influence of confounding factors, the author matched and adjusted multiple independent factors, including age, gender, and BMI. In addition, the impact of factors such as history of joint trauma and physical activity level were mentioned in the discussion sect...Conflict of Interest:
None declared. - Published on: 19 May 2023Correspondence on “Increased risk of osteoarthritis in patients with atopic disease” by Baker et al.
We read with great interest the article by Baker et al.,1 which reported an increased incidence of osteoarthritis in patients with asthma or atopic dermatitis, or a combination of both. They also noted that patients may benefit from the use of a drug. Drugs that inhibit mast cells and allergic cytokines are used to treat or prevent osteoarthritis. This study is a valuable addition to the literature. However, the authors must address some issues.
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First, your results show that type 2 immune responses specifically contribute to the risk of developing osteoarthritis, which may offset the significant association between type 2 immune response diseases and osteoarthritis.1 Type 2 immune response diseases include asthma, chronic urticaria, atopic dermatitis, allergic rhinitis, chronic rhinosinusitis, food allergies, anaphylaxis, drug hypersensitivity, and allergen immunotherapy.2, 3 However, the baseline type 2 immune response diseases data of the two groups were unavailable in this study, except for asthma and atopic dermatitis. The confounding effect of these variables may have contributed to causing incident osteoarthritis. Omitting these confounding effects may make the results less valid.
Second, a family history of osteoarthritis is a strong risk factor that is independently associated with incident osteoarthritis.4, 5 Epidemiological studies have shown that genetic factors contribute 50% or more to the effect.5 Hence, a family history of osteoarthritis...Conflict of Interest:
None declared. - Published on: 16 April 2023Atopic diseases might increase the risk of knee osteoarthritis: A Mendelian randomization study
We read with great interest the recent paper by Baker et al.1 regarding the association between atopic diseases and the risk of osteoarthritis (OA). By using data from two retrospective cohorts, this study showed that patients with atopic diseases have a higher risk of developing OA compared with the general population. Although the authors made great efforts to address confounders by using propensity score matching and adjusting for important baseline characteristics, residual confounding is an unavoidable methodological weakness of conventional observational studies that hinders causal inference. Mendelian randomization (MR) can overcome this limitation by leveraging randomly assorted genetic variants as instruments to study causal relationships. Therefore, we performed a two-sample MR analysis to investigate the causal effect of atopic diseases on OA.
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We extracted single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) significantly (P < 5×10−8) associated with atopic diseases including asthma (88,486 cases and 447,859 controls),2 atopic dermatitis (21,399 cases and 95,464 controls),3 allergic rhinitis (59,762 cases and 152,358 controls),4 and plasma total Immunoglobulin (IgE) concentrations (6,819 subjects)5 from previously published genome-wide association study (GWAS) meta-analyses. These SNPs were clumped for independence by linkage disequilibrium (r2 < 0.001 within 10,000 kb clumping distance), leaving 124 SNPs associated with asthma, 18 SNPs with atopic dermatitis, 32...Conflict of Interest:
None declared.