Transferability of European-derived Alzheimer’s Disease Polygenic Risk Scores across Multi-Ancestry Populations

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

A polygenic score (PGS) for Alzheimer’s disease (AD) was recently derived from data on genome-wide significant loci in European ancestry populations. We applied this PGS to populations in 17 European countries and observed a consistent association with AD risk, age at onset, and cerebrospinal fluid levels of AD biomarkers, independently of apolipoprotein E (APOE) . This PGS was also associated with the AD risk in many other populations of diverse ancestries. A cross-ancestry polygenic risk score (PRS) improved the association with AD risk in most of the multi-ancestry populations tested when the APOE region was included. Lastly, we found that the PGS/PRS, captured AD-specific information because the association weakened as the diagnosis was broadened. In conclusion, a simple PGS captures the AD-specific genetic information that is common to populations of different ancestries, but studies of more diverse populations are still needed for a better characterization of the AD genetics.