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Polygenic Risk Scores No Better Than Reports at Predicting Schizophrenia Outcomes
In patients with schizophrenia, polygenic risk scores were no better at predicting outcomes than information gleaned from standard psychiatric interviews, according to study findings recently published in Nature Medicine.
“The polygenic risk score basically adds up all of the traits that are associated with a complex disorder. Initially it was designed to be a descriptive tool. More recently, scientists have proposed that it could be an effective tool for precision medicine wherein a person’s genetics is used to diagnose disease and predict outcomes,” said study lead author Isotta Landi, PhD, a post-doctoral fellow at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City. “In this study, we wanted to rigorously test out whether the polygenic risk score could also be a predictive tool.”
Using an advanced computer program that both calculated polygenic risk scores from genetic data and pulled information from clinician-written reports of psychiatric interviews, researchers compared the ability of each for predicting 6 poor outcomes among 762 patients with schizophrenia.
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Although aggressive behavior and the need for hospitalization were significantly linked with higher polygenic risk scores, researchers found the scores were no more effective at predicting outcomes than information from written reports. Furthermore, combining the 2 tools did not enhance predictability.
When researchers performed the test using genetic and medical records of 7779 patients with schizophrenia in a second cohort, they again found that polygenic risk scores did not improve the ability to predict poor outcomes compared with written reports alone.
“Our results suggest that more work needs to be done to harness the potential that genetics has to improve the treatment of schizophrenia patients,” said senior study author Alexander W. Charney, MD, PhD, an assistant professor at Icahn Mount Sinai. “The results also suggest that the detailed medical reports that doctors write may contain much more valuable and predictive information than we originally anticipated.”
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