Laboratory perspectives in the development of polygenic risk scores for disease: A points to consider statement of the American College of Medical Genetics and Genomics (ACMG)

Complex health related disorders, including some forms of cardiovascular disease, diabetes, asthma, autism, and cancer, arise through the relative contributions of genetic, environmental, and lifestyle factors over long periods of time. Unlike monogenic disorders, complex disorders develop via a cumulative effect across many genomic loci, each conferring small individual risks. Polygenic risk scores (PRSs)1 combine these small individual variant effects to predict risk for developing complex disorders (Box 1) and may be combined with monogenic disease risk and nongenetic risk factors in an integrated risk model to predict disease risk more accurately.