Causal Relationship Between Average Alcohol Consumption and Risk of Atrial Fibrillation: A Mendelian Randomization Study

Atrial fibrillation (AF) is the most arrhythmia and is associated with higher risk of stroke, heart failure, and death.1common type of Given that the prevalence of AF is expected to further increase due to the aging population,1 improvement in primary prevention is of utmost importance. Heavy and binge drinking have been shown to increase the incidence of AF.1 However, studies on the association of low-moderate alcohol intake and incidence of AF have yielded controversial results.2,3 These discrepancies are mainly attributed to the nonrandomized design of these studies, residual confounding, and reverse causation. Mendelian randomization (MR) has gained attention as a robust method to infer association while addressing some of the inherent limitations of observational studies. In the present study, we conducted a 2-sample MR analysis to investigate the association between genetically predicted daily alcohol intake and AF. © 2019 Medical Journal of Babylon | Published by Wolters Kluwer - Medknow.