Genetics

This blog post critically examines a large-scale study evaluating a genome-wide polygenic risk score (PRS) for multiple sclerosis (MS) across independent European-ancestry cohorts, emphasizing both predictive performance and clinical interpretability. It explains how LD-aware PRS construction improves risk stratification beyond conventional factors and single-locus HLA tagging, and how pathway-specific PRS analyses map MS genetic liability onto coherent immunologic and signalling programs. The post also discusses extensions to familial prediction and associations between inherited susceptibility —particularly thalamic atrophy—while appraising causal inference attempts via Mendelian randomization and clarifying key translational limitations (ancestry generalizability, base-rate constraints, and ascertainment sensitivity).