Previous studies have suggested an association between blood inflammation-related factors and postherpetic neuralgia. However, the causal relationship between blood inflammation-related factors and postherpetic neuralgia remains unclear.
We employed a bidirectional Two-sample Mendelian randomization (MR) analysis to explore the causal relationship between blood inflammation-related factors and postherpetic neuralgia. The instrumental variables were obtained from a large Genome-wide association study (GWAS) meta-analysis dataset of European descent. The instrumental variables of the blood inflammation-related factors come from the database numbers GCST004420 to GCST004460 and GCST90029070. Postherpetic neuralgia has 195,191 samples with a total of 16,380,406 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs). MR analyses were performed using inverse-variance weighted, MR-Egger, and weighted median methods.
The MR results revealed a significant causal effect of Macrophage Inflammatory Protein 1 Beta (MIP1β) on reducing the risk of postherpetic neuralgia (95%CI = 0.492–0.991,
This study identifies MIP1β, IL-10, and IL-12p70 as potential therapeutic targets for preventing or treating postherpetic neuralgia, underscoring the need for further research in this area.