Association between telomere length and Parkinson's disease: a Mendelian randomization study.

In this study, we examined the potential association of telomere length with Parkinson's disease (PD) using the publicly available genome-wide association study summary statistics from the International Parkinson's Disease Genomics Consortium involving up to 37,688 patients with PD and 449,056 controls in Mendelian randomization framework. The Mendelian randomization approach has the potential to investigate a causal relationship between a risk factor and a disease, avoiding confounding and reverse causation that often present in conventional epidemiological studies. We did not find that longer telomeres were associated with higher risks of PD (odds ratio: 1.18, 95% confidence interval: 0.94, 1.48, p = 0.15). Our study, therefore, did not provide evidence to support a potential causal relationship between telomere length and PD.