'Polygenic Risk Score' May Help Determine Child's Height
A new study published in The Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism has revealed that the polygenic risk score is accurate at predicting adult short stature among kids, similar to using mid-parental .
Brent Richards, MD, MSc, professor of medicine in the department of at McGill University in Montreal led the study and he said that “Clinicians could consider using a polygenic risk score when trying to decide to prevent short stature, particularly when bone age is not available and the height of one parent is known. It is particularly helpful for children who do not know the height of both parents.”
According to the research, adult height is highly genealogical. However, mid-parental height is the only that has demonstrated clinical utility.
In their study, Brent Richards and his colleagues discussed that several approaches have been created and clinically adopted to predict adult height based on present height measures and bone age as determined by hand and wrist X-ray, including methods namely the Roche-Wainer-Thissen, Bayley-Pinneau, and the Tanner-Whitehouse. And even though bone age has been identified as one of the most significant predictors of final adult height, and has been used in these prediction approaches, determining bone age requires:
- An
- A radiologist interpreting the images
- Calculating the predicted adult height.
Therefore, the scientists came up with a polygenic risk score to determine adult height, based on a meta-analysis of genome-wide association research and calculated on the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC) cohort.
According to , the cohort comprised 442,599 genotyped White British partaking in the UK Biobank, and 941 genotyped child-parent trios of European descent from the ALSPAC cohort.
To measure standing height, the group used a stadiometer; standing height 2 standard deviations lower than the sex-specific population average was viewed as short stature.
Scientists found that a polygenic risk score, combined with sex, captured 71.1% of the total variance in grownup height in the UK Biobank.
In the ALSPAC cohort, the polygenic risk score was able to recognize kids who developed short stature as adults with an area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUROC) of 0.84, which is similar to that of mid-parental height.
The study also revealed that the polygenic risk score can be used as an alternative to mid-parental height in age-particular Khamis-Roche height predictors, to who are at a risk for getting short stature as adults. Using both the polygenic risk score and mid-parental height will provide improved prediction accuracy instead of using either metric by itself. Richard, however, tells that the data was limited to people of European ancestry and that the polygenic risk scores will improve with more sample sizes.
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