Approved Research

Applying Polygenic Risk Scores to the Spectrum of Diverticular Disease

Lay summary

Diverticular disease is a widespread source of chronic health burden. We know that a healthy lifestyle is important to preventing progression of diverticular disease, and we are beginning to understand more about some of the genetic risk factors involved. One way of translating genetic information to tools that are useful for doctors and patients is through a polygenic risk score, which combines many small genetic effects linked with a disease into a single susceptibility score. Specifically in diverticular disease, there has been some evidence that a polygenic risk score may be able to help identify individuals with more of a tendency to get the disease. Before this can be used, we must understand whether the polygenic risk score helps when we consider other known risk factors such as lifestyle variables. Our aim is to study how a polygenic risk score performs in risk prediction for diverticular disease when looking at the effects of a person's lifestyle. This will help us in identifying a potential future role for polygenic risk scores alongside existing tools used by doctors for risk prediction.