Genetics

This blog post examines a multi-ancestry genetic study of multiple sclerosis that builds the ADAMS cohort and integrates it with UK Biobank controls to evaluate how well established European-ancestry MS signals generalize to South Asian and African ancestry participants in the UK. It explains the study’s design (recruitment, genotyping, imputation, and ancestry inference), highlights the central result that the MHC/HLA region remains the strongest and most consistent source of association across ancestries, and interprets suggestive non-MHC findings as preliminary due to limited sample size. The post also contextualizes HLA-imputation results—including concordance with canonical risk alleles such as HLA-DRB1*15:01 and a potential ancestry-influenced signal in African-ancestry participants—and closes by discussing why European-derived polygenic risk scores show reduced predictive power in non-European cohorts, underscoring both the biological insight gained and the urgent need for larger, diverse MS GWAS to enable equitable translation.