Polygenic scores increase disease risk prediction

Two studies in Nature Genetics suggest that aggregating SNPs, instead of assessing single SNPs, to generate risk scores from genome-wide association studies (GWAS) could improve predictions for disease risk.

The use of individual gene variants identified through GWAS as disease risk markers is frequently limited by their small effect sizes. Researchers are attempting to develop polygenic scores to predict risk, which are calculated by summing the contributions of all disease-associated risk loci. ...