Abstract
A new study confirms that using a polygenic risk score (PRS) derived from genome-wide association studies (GWAS) for predicting heart disease in people who have never had a heart attack can be used in populations other than the ones used to develop them.
Findings like this are critical to the eventual widespread clinical use of PRSs for assigning heart disease risk and implementing prevention strategies. In this latest study, researchers tested two previously published PRSs for coronary artery disease (CAD) based on GWAS data from European populations on a different, though ancestrally related, population.
“Our results indicate that CAD PRS developed in European-ancestry individuals perform quite well in the genetically and environmentally homogenous French-Canadian population. How well these same PRS would predict CAD in a more diverse European-ancestry population, or in a population living in a very different environment, remain critical open questions for further investigation,” the authors wrote in the paper published in the June 11, 2019 edition of Circulation: Genomic and Precision Medicine, an American Heart Association journal.
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