GWAS of Educational Attainment, Phase 3: Prediction

Genetic factors are estimated to account for at least 20% of the variation across individuals for educational attainment (Rietveld et al., 2013). The results of the latest GWAS for educational attainment identified 74... [ view full abstract ]

Genetic factors are estimated to account for at least 20% of the variation across individuals for educational attainment (Rietveld et al., 2013). The results of the latest GWAS for educational attainment identified 74 genome-wide significant loci for educational attainment (Okbay et al., 2016). Here, in one of the largest GWAS to date, we increase our sample to nearly 750,000 individuals, and we identify over 600 genome-wide significant loci associated with the number of years of schooling completed. Note that at the time of writing, we will likely have updated our meta-analysis to include over 1,000,000 individuals.

In this presentation, I will highlight our polygenic prediction results. We predict using 2 samples, the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) and The National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health). Overall, we find that our polygenic scores explain around 10% of the variation in educational attainment, making these scores some of the most powerful genetic predictors created to date. I will also focus on the prediction of other related phenotypes, such as high school and college completion, verbal cognition, GPA, etc., and I will contrast the predictive power of our scores at different p-value thresholds and at different sample sizes of our meta-analysis. Finally, I will present a novel analysis demonstrating how the predictive power of our polygenic score fluctuates as a result of changes in the heritability and genetic correlation of educational attainment across the cohorts included in our study.

References

Okbay, A., Beauchamp, J. P., Fontana, M. A., Lee, J. J., Pers, T. H., Rietveld, C. A., … Benjamin, D. J. (2016). Genome-wide association study identifies 74 loci associated with educational attainment. Nature, 533, 539–542. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature...

Rietveld, C. A., Medland, S. E., Derringer, J., Yang, J., Esko, T., Martin, N. W., … Koellinger, P. D. (2013). GWAS of 126,559 individuals identifies genetic variants associated with educational attainment. Science, 340(6139), 1467–1471. https://doi.org/10.1126/scienc...