Abstract
Combining information from multiple GWASs for a disease and its risk factors has proven a powerful approach for development of polygenic risk scores (PRSs). This may be particularly useful for type 2 diabetes (T2D), a highly polygenic and heterogeneous disease where the additional predictive value of a PRS is unclear. Here, we use a meta-scoring approach to develop a metaPRS for T2D that incorporated genome-wide associations from both European and non-European genetic ancestries and T2D risk factors. We evaluated the performance of this metaPRS and benchmarked it against existing genome-wide PRS in 620,059 participants and 50,572 T2D cases amongst six diverse genetic ancestries from UK Biobank, INTERVAL, the All of Us Research Program, and the Singapore Multi-Ethnic Cohort. We show that our metaPRS was the most powerful PRS for predicting T2D in European population-based cohorts and had comparable performance to the top ancestry-specific PRS, highlighting its transferability. In UK Biobank, we show the metaPRS had stronger predictive power for 10-year risk than all individual risk factors apart from BMI and biomarkers of dysglycemia. The metaPRS modestly improved T2D risk stratification of QDiabetes risk scores for 10-year risk prediction, particularly when prioritising individuals for blood tests of dysglycemia. Overall, we present a highly predictive and transferrable PRS for T2D and demonstrate that the potential for PRS to incrementally improve T2D risk prediction when incorporated into UK guideline-recommended screening and risk prediction with a clinical risk score.