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01-12-2021 | Breast Cancer | Research article

Evaluating the prognostic performance of a polygenic risk score for breast cancer risk stratification

Authors: Maria Olsen, Krista Fischer, Patrick M. Bossuyt, Els Goetghebeur

Published in: BMC Cancer | Issue 1/2021

Abstract

Background

Polygenic risk scores (PRS) could potentially improve breast cancer screening recommendations. Before a PRS can be considered for implementation, it needs rigorous evaluation, using performance measures that can inform about its future clinical value.

Objectives

To evaluate the prognostic performance of a regression model with a previously developed, prevalence-based PRS and age as predictors for breast cancer incidence in women from the Estonian biobank (EstBB) cohort; to compare it to the performance of a model including age only.

Methods

We analyzed data on 30,312 women from the EstBB cohort. They entered the cohort between 2002 and 2011, were between 20 and 89 years, without a history of breast cancer, and with full 5-year follow-up by 2015. We examined PRS and other potential risk factors as possible predictors in Cox regression models for breast cancer incidence. With 10-fold cross-validation we estimated 3- and 5-year breast cancer incidence predicted by age alone and by PRS plus age, fitting models on 90% of the data. Calibration, discrimination, and reclassification were calculated on the left-out folds to express prognostic performance.

Results

A total of 101 (3.33‰) and 185 (6.1‰) incident breast cancers were observed within 3 and 5 years, respectively. For women in a defined screening age of 50–62 years, the ratio of observed vs PRS-age modelled 3-year incidence was 0.86 for women in the 75–85% PRS-group, 1.34 for the 85–95% PRS-group, and 1.41 for the top 5% PRS-group. For 5-year incidence, this was respectively 0.94, 1.15, and 1.08. Yet the number of breast cancer events was relatively low in each PRS-subgroup. For all women, the model’s AUC was 0.720 (95% CI: 0.675–0.765) for 3-year and 0.704 (95% CI: 0.670–0.737) for 5-year follow-up, respectively, just 0.022 and 0.023 higher than for the model with age alone. Using a 1% risk prediction threshold, the 3-year NRI for the PRS-age model was 0.09, and 0.05 for 5 years.

Conclusion

The model including PRS had modest incremental performance over one based on age only. A larger, independent study is needed to assess whether and how the PRS can meaningfully contribute to age, for developing more efficient screening strategies.

Available only for authorised users

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Title: Evaluating the prognostic performance of a polygenic risk score for breast cancer risk stratification
Authors: Maria Olsen
Krista Fischer
Patrick M. Bossuyt
Els Goetghebeur
Publication date: 01-12-2021
Publisher: BioMed Central
Keywords: Breast Cancer
Breast Cancer
Biomarkers
Published in: BMC Cancer / Issue 1/2021
Electronic ISSN: 1471-2407
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1186/s12885-021-08937-8

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