Exploring the Relative Contribution of Genetic and External Exposomic Risk Scores to Allergies in Elderly Women

Allergies have been linked to immune dysfunction, genetics, and environmental factors. However, environmental exposures are often highly correlated similar to genetic predictors making the cumulative assessment of exposures difficult. Here, we aim to investigate the relative contribution of genetic variants as well as different individual and environmental factors on the presence or absence of allergies in a cohort of elderly German women by using genetic risk scores (GRS) and exposomal risk scores. The weights of the risk scores were obtained through bootstrapped and cross-validated ridge regression. We used the novel cross leverage scores to select genetic variants for GRS. We characterized the relative contributions of the risk scores to presence of allergies such as atopic dermatitis, asthma, or allergic rhinitis using McFadden’s Pseudo R-squared. Overall, our model was able to explain 11.13% of the variance of being diagnosed with allergies. The GRS had the highest relative contribution at 3.80%, followed by the meteorological risk score with 1.13%. This method can easily be adapted to other diseases and can facilitate health risk assessments of exposomal factors. In addition, the results may aid policy-making, for example, by regulating specific sources of exposure. Word Count : 190