Appraising the causal relevance of DNA methylation for risk of lung cancer
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: DNA methylation changes in peripheral blood have recently been identified in relation to lung cancer risk. Some of these changes have been suggested to mediate part of the effect of smoking on lung cancer. However, limitations with conventional mediation analyses mean that the causal nature of these methylation changes has yet to be fully elucidated. METHODS: We first performed a meta-analysis of four epigenome-wide association studies (EWAS) of lung cancer (918 cases, 918 controls). Next, we conducted a two-sample Mendelian randomization analysis, using genetic instruments for methylation at CpG sites identified in the EWAS meta-analysis, and 29 863 cases and 55 586 controls from the TRICL-ILCCO lung cancer consortium, to appraise the possible causal role of methylation at these sites on lung cancer. RESULTS: Sixteen CpG sites were identified from the EWAS meta-analysis [false discovery rate (FDR) < 0.05], for 14 of which we could identify genetic instruments. Mendelian randomization provided little evidence that DNA methylation in peripheral blood at the 14 CpG sites plays a causal role in lung cancer development (FDR > 0.05), including for cg05575921-AHRR where methylation is strongly associated with both smoke exposure and lung cancer risk. CONCLUSIONS: The results contrast with previous observational and mediation analysis, which have made strong claims regarding the causal role of DNA methylation. Thus, previous suggestions of a mediating role of methylation at sites identified in peripheral blood, such as cg05575921-AHRR, could be unfounded. However, this study does not preclude the possibility that differential DNA methylation at other sites is causally involved in lung cancer development, especially within lung tissue.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".