• Xiangyi Dai, Kaiping Jiang, Xiaojun Ma, Hongtao Hu, Xiaoai Mo, Kaizhou Huang, Qunfang Jiang, Ying Chen, and Chonglin Liu.
• Eighth Clinical College, Guangzhou University of Chinese Medicine, Foshan, China.
• Medicine (Baltimore). 2024 Mar 22; 103 (12): e37478e37478.

AbstractTargeting the gut microbiota is an emerging strategy to treat nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD). Nonetheless, the causal relationship between specific gut microbiota and NAFLD remains unclear. We first obtained genome-wide association study statistics on gut microbiota and NAFLD from publicly available databases. We then performed the Mendelian randomization (MR) analysis to determine the potential causal relationship between the gut microbiota and NAFLD by 5 different methods, and conducted a series of sensitivity analyses to validate the robustness of the MR analysis results. Furthermore, we investigated the direction of causality by bidirectional MR analysis. For 211 gut microbiota, 2 MR methods confirmed that phylum Tenericutes, class Deltaproteobacteria and class Mollicutes were significantly associated with the risk of NAFLD. Heterogeneity (P > .05) and pleiotropy (P > .05) analyses validated the robustness of the MR results. There was no causal effect of NAFLD on these bacterial taxa in the reverse MR analysis. We identified specific gut microbiota with causal effects on NAFLD through gene prediction, which may provide useful guidance for targeting the gut microbiota to intervene and treat NAFLD.Copyright © 2024 the Author(s). Published by Wolters Kluwer Health, Inc.

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