PPM 03-0311-190017

Nature of the proposed Research: A Precision Medicine Approach to Prevent Diabetic Complications in the Local Population of Qatar (the QGPRS Study). Context: Qatar is listed amongst the top 10 countries in the world with the highest prevalence (23%) of diabetes. Diabetes is the leading cause of cardiovascular and renal diseases that are both serious and costly. Improvement of the risk prediction is crucial to enable targeting individuals at high risk that could most benefit from an early prevention. However, this is most useful if prevention can be started early. Unfortunately, current clinical risk prediction algorithms are only applicable once clinical signs have been observed. Genetic information, with which one is born, offers a way to make early detection of risk. A successful application of genome wide association studies (GWAS) has been the identification of multiple common variants associated to complex traits such as T2D, renal and cardiovascular diseases. Taken individually, these genetic variants account for only a small effect size but the combination of hundreds or even thousands of them into polygenic risk scores (PRS) was recently introduced into models used to predict individual risk of diseases and their complications. What is a PRS? A PRS is a number that defines the level of risk a person has, to develop a disease or its complications over a defined period. The PRS considers the multiple genomic variants of a person and match them to “reference” individuals included in a database. The outcomes of the best matched individuals are then used to infer the outcomes of the new person before any clinical signs.