2.1. Plasma protein quantitative trait loci data

We incorporated pQTLs that fulfilled the subsequent set of criteria: ①demonstrating a significant correlation at the genome-wide level (P < 5e-8); ② being situated outside the major histocompatibility complex (MHC) region (chr6, 26-34Mb); ③ demonstrate distinct associations [linkage disequilibrium (LD) clustering r^2 < 0.001]. In the preliminary analysis, we extracted plasma pQTL data from public research (15), which consolidated findings from five general studies (11, 16–19). About the aforementioned selection criteria, a total of 2,113 cis and trans SNPs associated with 1,699 proteins were included ( Supplementary Table 2 ). The aforementioned databases have been concurrently utilized in previous studies, alleviating concerns regarding their reliability (13). The above databases are all derived from European populations.