Polygenic risk score for early identification of coronary artery disease in a real-world clinical setting within the Latvian patient population.
STUDY OBJECTIVE: Polygenic risk scores (PRS) are increasingly recognized for their potential to improve coronary artery disease (CAD) prediction beyond traditional clinical models. This study evaluated the utility of genome-wide association study (GWAS) - derived PRS and pathway-specific PRS (PS-PRS) in the Latvian population, aiming to assess their association with CAD and compare their predictive performance with conventional risk factors. DESIGN PARTICIPANTS AND MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: The study included 90 early-onset CAD patients and 43 controls with no evidence of atherosclerotic lesions on coronary angiography, with next-generation sequencing performed. PRS was calculated using 192 single nucleotide variants identified from the CARDIoGRAMplusC4D GWAS meta-analysis. The predictive accuracy of PRS, PS-PRS, clinical risk factors, and their combinations was analyzed via ROC curves. RESULTS: The average age was 48.7 years in CAD patients and 49.8 in controls. CAD patients showed significantly higher PRS (mean 0.31) compared to controls (mean - 0.65; p < 0.0001). PRS alone had moderate discriminatory power (AUC = 0.773), slightly lower than LDL cholesterol (AUC = 0.775) and total cholesterol (AUC = 0.821). Combining clinical risk factors improved prediction (AUC = 0.872), with the highest accuracy when PRS was integrated with all clinical factors (AUC = 0.933). The PRS distributions were significantly elevated in early-onset CAD patients across the angiogenesis/tissue repair pathway (p = 0.00038), inflammation pathway (p = 0.043), vascular remodelling pathway (p = 0.0116), and pathway of genes with unknown function in atherosclerosis (p = 0.0035), but overall PRS demonstrated superior discrimination compared to pathway-specific PRS. CONCLUSIONS: Incorporating PRS enhances early-onset CAD risk prediction. Pathway specific PRS had lower discriminative ability than the overall PRS.