Identifying the genetic association between systemic lupus erythematosus and the risk of autoimmune liver diseases

Previous studies on the relationship between systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) and autoimmune liver diseases (AILDs) are inconclusive. Therefore, we employed Mendelian randomization (MR) to explore the causal associations between SLE and AILDs. A two-sample MR analysis was performed using summary-level statistics sourced from genome-wide association study (GWAS) datasets. Inverse-variance weighting (IVW), MR‒Egger, and weighted median (WM) were further supported by several sensitivity analyses. We detected causal genetic associations between SLE and primary biliary cholangitis (PBC) (odds ratio (OR) = 1.31, 95% CI = 1.15–1.51, P