Polygenic modeling of genetic effects on both phenotypic mean and variance: distributional regression for BMI, blood and urine biomarkers in the UK Biobank (opens in new tab)

Polygenic scores (PGS) are commonly used to estimate the cumulative genetic contribution to complex traits by aggregating the effects of multiple genetic variants. In the case of continuous phenotypes, traditional methods have primarily focused on predicting the effect of variants on the phenotypic mean, thereby overlooking potential genetic influences that modulate phenotypic variance. Recent studies suggest that variance quantitative trait loci (vQTLs) provide important insights into the ge...