GenoRisk: A polygenic risk score for Alzheimer's disease.

Introduction: Recent clinical trials are considering inclusion of more than just apolipoprotein E () ε4 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 × 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 terms, and 29 additional SNPs performed the best. This model explained an additional 19% of the heritable risk compared to 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.