According to a recent study conducted by a team of researchers from the University of Virginia and elsewhere, polygenic transcriptome risk scores (PTRS) could improve cross-ancestry disease risk prediction for COPD over polygenic risk scores (PRS). The findings of the study, published in the American Journal of Human Genetics, PTRS would focus on the underlying biological mechanisms of a trait or disease, which are shared across ancestries, thus helping in gauging COPD susceptibility across human ancestry groups. The researchers pointed out that the PRS models had decreased performance when applied to African Americans, as compared to non-Hispanic whites, dropping from an odds ratio of 1.57 for moderate-to-severe COPD for all participants to 1.24.