Genetic variants associated with sepsis

Abstract

Background The variable presentations and different phenotypes of sepsis suggest that risk of sepsis comes from many genes each having a small effect. The cumulative effect can be used to create individual risk profile. The purpose of this study was to create a polygenic risk score and determine the genetic variants associated with sepsis. Methods We sequenced ~14 million single nucleotide polymorphisms with a minimac imputation quality R2>0.3 and minor allele frequency >10−6 in patients with Sepsis-2 or Sepsis-3. Genome-wide association was performed using Firth bias-corrected logistic regression. Semi-parsimonious logistic regression was used to create polygenic risk scores and reduced regression to determine the genetic variants independently associated with sepsis. Findings 2261 patients had sepsis and 13,068 control patients did not. The polygenic risk scores had good discrimination: c-statistic = 0.752 ± 0.005 for Sepsis-2 and 0.752 ± 0.007 for Sepsis-3. We found 772 genetic variants associated with Sepsis-2 and 442 with Sepsis-3, pConclusions Sepsis-2 and Sepsis-3 have both separate and shared genetic variants. Most genetic variants have small effects sizes, but cumulatively, the polygenic risk scores have good discrimination.