Using lifestyle information in polygenic modeling of blood pressure traits: a simple method to reduce bias.

Many traits of medical relevance are "complex" in that they are affected by both genetic and environmental factors. Thus, using genetic and environmental information in statistical methods has the potential to increase the accuracy of phenotypic prediction, the ultimate goal of precision medicine. However, the correlation between the genetic and environmental components (that arises when environmental variables are themselves genetically determined) and the correlations between environmental measures can be problematic for most statistical methods used for modeling complex traits. In this work, we investigated these issues using 27 lifestyle measures in addition to genetic information for predicting diastolic blood pressure, systolic blood pressure, and pulse pressure in older individuals. We show that including lifestyle and genetic data resulted in more accurate predictions than either data type alone. Moreover, adjusting the lifestyle measures for the genetic and other non-genetic effects can help improve the predictions further.