Genome-wide polygenic risk score for major osteoporotic fractures in postmenopausal women using associated single nucleotide polymorphisms

BACKGROUND: Osteoporosis is highly polygenic and heritable, with heritability ranging from 50 to 80%; most inherited susceptibility is associated with the cumulative effect of many common genetic variants. However, existing genetic risk scores (GRS) only provide a few percent predictive power for osteoporotic fracture. METHODS: We derived and validated a novel genome-wide polygenic score (GPS) comprised of 103,155 common genetic variants to quantify this susceptibility and tested this GPS prediction ability in an independent dataset (n = 15,776). RESULTS: Among postmenopausal women, we found a fivefold gradient in the risk of major osteoporotic fracture (MOF) (p < 0.001) and a 15.25-fold increased risk of severe osteoporosis (p < 0.001) across the GPS deciles. Compared with the remainder of the GPS distribution, the top GPS decile was associated with a 3.59-, 2.48-, 1.92-, and 1.58-fold increased risk of any fracture, MOF, hip fracture, and spine fracture, respectively. The top GPS decile also identified nearly twofold more high-risk osteoporotic patients than the top decile of conventional GRS based on 1103 conditionally independent genome-wide significant SNPs. Although the relative risk of severe osteoporosis for postmenopausal women at around 50 is relatively similar, the cumulative incident at 20-year follow-up is significantly different between the top GPS decile (13.7%) and the bottom decile (< 1%). In the subgroup analysis, the GPS transferability in non-Hispanic White is better than in other racial/ethnic groups. CONCLUSIONS: This new method to quantify inherited susceptibility to osteoporosis and osteoporotic fracture affords new opportunities for clinical prevention and risk assessment. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12967-023-03974-2.