Association between tea consumption and risk of kidney stones: results from dose–response meta-analysis of prospective studies and Mendelian randomization analysis

The association between tea consumption and kidney stones is inconsistent in observational studies. Thus, we performed a dose–response meta-analysis of prospective cohort studies and a two-sample Mendelian randomization (MR) analysis to identify this association.

The prospective cohort studies reporting the relationship between tea consumption and kidney stones were searched from PubMed, the Cochrane Library, EMBASE, and Web of Science from inception to December 1, 2023. For MR analysis, the summary-level data for tea consumption and kidney stones were extracted from the UK Biobank available data and the 8th release of the FinnGen consortium, respectively. The inverse-variance weighted (IVW) method was the primary analytical method.

In our dose–response meta-analysis, four prospective cohort studies involving 1,263,008 participants were included, and tea consumption was found to have significant associations with kidney stones (RR: 0.80, 95% CI: 0.73–0.87). We also observed a substantially linear negative relationship between tea consumption and the risk of kidney stones. In MR analysis, the IVW method indicated that tea consumption was inversely associated with kidney stones (OR: 0.71, 95% CI: 0.53–0.94).

Our study confirmed a causal relationship between tea consumption and kidney stones, and higher tea consumption may reduce the risk of kidney stones.