Bibliometric and Two-Sample Mendelian Randomization Analyses of the Causal Relationship Between Hypertension and Erectile Dysfunction

Genetic data links hypertension to erectile dysfunction, but the paper never states the actual effect size

Journal: Journal of visualized experiments : JoVE | Published: 2026-06-26 | Type: Journal Article, Video-Audio Media | PMID: 42441558 Authors: Wang Jisheng, Deng Sheng, Teng Fei, Wang Lu, Wang Zixi, Li Haisong, Meng Fanchao, Wang Xian (Departments of Andrology and Cardiology, Beijing University of Chinese Medicine and affiliated hospitals) Funding/COI: Not listed

Summary

This is two unrelated studies stapled into one paper. The first half counts publications about hypertension-related erectile dysfunction (1,661 articles, 2001-2025) and maps which countries and journals produced them. The second half runs a Mendelian randomization analysis, using genetic variants tied to hypertension as a proxy to test whether hypertension causally drives erectile dysfunction risk, and reports that it does.

Claims

• 1,661 articles on hypertension-related ED were published across 1,099 journals between 2001 and 2025
• The United States, University of São Paulo, and the Journal of Sexual Medicine were the most prolific country, institution, and journal respectively; Faix, A. was the most prolific author
• Common keywords: nitric oxide, metabolic syndrome, endothelial dysfunction
• Two-sample Mendelian randomization, using inverse variance weighting as the primary method with MR-Egger and weighted median as sensitivity checks, found hypertension has "a significant positive causal effect" on ED risk

Study Quality

The bibliometric half is standard descriptive work: pull records from Web of Science, count them by country/journal/author, cluster keywords. It's a map of the literature, not new clinical evidence, and the abstract doesn't report the metrics (citation counts, co-authorship network density, burst detection values) that would let a reader judge how the "hotspots" were derived.

The MR half is the substantive claim, and it's where the abstract falls short. It names the analytic methods (IVW, MR-Egger, weighted median) and says heterogeneity and pleiotropy were checked, which is the right toolkit for two-sample MR. But it gives no effect size, confidence interval, or p-value for the "significant positive causal effect," no count of SNPs used as instruments, and no identification of the GWAS datasets the hypertension and ED summary statistics came from. Without those, "significant positive causal effect" is a conclusion asserted rather than a result a reader can evaluate.

Red Flags

• No funding source or conflict-of-interest statement disclosed
• No effect estimate (OR/beta), confidence interval, or p-value given for the central MR finding
• No SNP count or GWAS source (sample sizes, populations) reported for either exposure or outcome
• Published in JoVE, a video-methods journal, which is an unusual venue for an MR/bibliometric analysis rather than a technique demonstration
• Combining a bibliometric survey with a causal-inference analysis in one paper is an odd pairing; the two halves don't inform each other

Strengths

• Uses two-sample MR with three complementary estimators (IVW, MR-Egger, weighted median), which is appropriate practice for triangulating causal estimates
• Includes stated sensitivity analyses for heterogeneity and pleiotropy, the standard checks against confounding in MR
• Large literature base for the bibliometric portion (1,661 articles over 24 years)

Verdict

The MR approach is methodologically sound in principle, but the abstract withholds the numbers that would let anyone check the work: no effect size, no instrument count, no data source. Until the full text is checked for those figures, treat the "significant positive causal effect" as an assertion, not a demonstrated result. The bibliometric half adds little beyond a literature map already implied by decades of endothelial-dysfunction research linking the two conditions.