That takes into account not only European populationsA group of international researchers have developed a new method to create a polygenic risk score (PPR) that more accurately predicts disease risk in different populations, as they report in the journal Nature Genetics. Discuss
Changes in the DNA sequence of a gene can lead to a genetic variant that increases the risk of developing diseases. PPR combine the influence of genetic variants across the genome and show the promise of their use to predict the likelihood of developing diseases in individual patients.
However, PPR needs to be “trained” predict disease risk using data from other studies. The main problem with the existing methods for calculating PPR is that, to date, most genomic studies have used data collected from individuals of European descent. According to the authors of the study, this creates a Eurocentric bias in existing PEPs, leading to significantly less accurate predictions and raising the possibility that they may overestimate or underestimate disease risk in non-European populations.
In the study, scientists used genomic data from people from several different populations to predict a wide range of physical measures (such as height, body mass index and blood pressure), blood biomarkers (such as glucose and cholesterol), and risk for schizophrenia. They then compared the predicted symptom or disease risk with actual scores or reported disease status to measure the predictive accuracy of the new PPR. in non-European populations.