GenoRisk: A polygenic risk score for Alzheimer's disease

Introduction Recent clinical trials are considering inclusion of more than just apolipoprotein E (APOE) epsilon 4 genotype as a way of reducing variability in analysis of outcomes. Methods Case-control data were used to compare the capacity of age, sex, and 58 Alzheimer's disease (AD)-associated single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) to predict AD status using several statistical models. Model performance was assessed with Brier scores and tenfold cross-validation. Genotype and sex x age estimates from the best performing model were combined with age and intercept estimates from the general population to develop a personalized genetic risk score, termed age, and sex-adjusted GenoRisk. Results The elastic net model that included age, age x sex interaction, allelic APOE terms, and 29 additional SNPs performed the best. This model explained an additional 19% of the heritable risk compared to APOE genotype alone and achieved an area under the curve of 0.747. Discussion GenoRisk could improve the risk assessment of individuals identified for prevention studies.