Specialized risk scores derived from testing that calculates the cumulative effect of an individual’s entire DNA sequence, the genome, may reliably predict heart disease in people who have not yet had a heart attack, according to new research in Circulation: Genomic and Precision Medicine, an American Heart Association journal.

The study is the latest to use polygenic risk scores (PRSs) based on an individual’s entire genome sequence as biomarkers to predict the risk to develop coronary artery disease and heart attack. Several published studies have used PRSs with high accuracy in people of European ancestry. Researchers in this most recent study set out to determine if the results would translate to a different population, in this case French Canadians.

Researchers studied two similar PRSs in 3,639 French Canadian adults with cardiovascular disease and 7,382 adults without heart disease. They found that the PRSs developed and tested in other populations also had the sensitivity and specificity for predicting heart disease in French Canadians.

“PRSs, built using very large data sets of people with and without heart disease, look for genetic changes in the DNA that influence disease risk, whereas individual genes might have only a small effect on disease predisposition,” said Guillaume Lettre, PhD, lead author of the study and an associate professor at the Montreal Heart Institute and Université de Montréal in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. “The PRS is like having a snapshot of the whole genetic variation found in one’s DNA and can more powerfully predict one’s disease risk. Using the score, we can better understand whether someone is at higher or lower risk to develop a heart problem.”