Evaluating Polygenic Score Transferability for Lipid Traits in Underrepresented Populations: Evidence from Samoan Cohorts

Dyslipidemia is a significant risk factor for cardiovascular disease (CVD), the leading cause of death in Samoa. ¹ Polygenic scores (PGS) for lipid traits offer promise for improved CVD risk prediction, ^4,5 yet their performance in Pacific Islander populations — comprising only 0.002% of GWAS participants as of 2024 ³ — remains unknown. We evaluated the transferability of multi-ancestry PGS for LDL cholesterol (LDL-C), HDL cholesterol (HDL-C), triglycerides (TG), and total cholesterol (TC) in 4,342 Samoan adults across five cohorts spanning 1990–2010. PGS from Graham et al. ⁸ and Kanoni et al. ⁹ multi-ancestry meta-analyses were harmonized with genome-wide imputed genotypes using a Samoan-specific reference panel ²¹ and performance was assessed via incremental R² from linear mixed models with bootstrapped confidence intervals. ²⁵ HDL-C showed the highest performance (incremental R² 5.0–15.0%), followed by TC (5.0–10.7%), LDL-C (5.7–8.6%), and TG (3.5–7.0%). Critically, meaningful LDL-C performance was achieved only with the genome-wide PRS-CS score (99.6–99.7% variant matching), while a curated pruning-and-thresholding score achieved ∼9% matching and near-zero performance. These findings establish the first systematic lipid PGS benchmarks in Samoans, demonstrating meaningful transferability when genome-wide variant coverage is ensured, and highlight variant harmonization as a critical precondition for PGS deployment in underrepresented populations.