Scandinavian Working Papers in Economics

DaCHE discussion papers,
University of Southern Denmark, Dache - Danish Centre for Health Economics

No 2016:7: Measuring the Effect of the Polygenic Risk Score on the Aging Rate

Georgios Effraimidis (), Morgan Levine () and Eileen Crimmins ()
Additional contact information
Georgios Effraimidis: COHERE, Postal: Department of Business and Economics, University of Southern Denmark
Morgan Levine: Department of Human Genetics, Postal: UCLA, U.S.A.
Eileen Crimmins: USC Davis School of Gerontology, Postal: U.S.A.

Abstract: Population aging has emerged as a major demographic trend around the globe. Aging is a process that is determined by millions of genetic factors. The identification of the set of genetic factors that has a significant role in the aging process is a highly challenging task. This paper studies the association between genetic factors and the aging rate. We first calculate the so-called polygenic risk score (PRS) by following a well-designed algorithm for the selection of the significant single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) and subsequently considering a weighted sum of those significant SNPs. Next, we construct a new mortality model, which allows the aging rate to depend on the PRS. Our statistical analysis is based on a rich dataset from the Health and Retirement Study.

Keywords: Aging rate; Genome-wide association study; Mortality rate; Polygenic risk score

JEL-codes: C14

31 pages, September 18, 2016

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