Development and Validation of Polygenic Risk Scores for Blood Pressure Traits in Continental African Populations

Most polygenic risk scores (PRS) have been developed in European populations, frequently leading to limited transferability across diverse ancestry populations. This study aimed to develop and evaluate PRS for blood pressure (BP) traits in continental African populations and investigate how African genetic diversity influences PRS performance.

We generated PRS for systolic BP, diastolic BP, pulse pressure, and hypertension. We used a pan-African cohort as the target population and compared single-ancestry and multi-ancestry PRS methods. We compared the performance of African ancestry-derived PRS against multi-ancestry PRS on the entire data set and within South, East, and West African subpopulations.

Multi-ancestry PRS demonstrated significantly higher predictive accuracy compared with single-ancestry PRS models. PRS predictive accuracy varied across different African regions, with the highest performance observed in East Africa. In the combined population, the difference in mean BP values between the first multi-ancestry PRS quartile and the top quartile was 6.53 (95% CI, 5.3-7.74), 3.81 (95% CI, 3.9-4.52), and 3.59 (95% CI, 2.4-4.32) mm Hg for systolic BP, diastolic BP, and pulse pressure, respectively. Individuals in the highest PRS risk quartile had odds of hypertension that were 1.47 (95% CI, 1.7-1.69) times greater than those in the lowest risk quartile.

These findings highlight the importance of integrating diverse ancestries in PRS development and accounting for subpopulation genetic variation to improve the predictive accuracy of BP PRS in African populations.