Polygenic predictors derived from earlier GWAS of EduYears have proven to be a valuable tool for researchers, especially in the social sciences6,7. We constructed polygenic scores for European-ancestry individuals in two prediction cohorts: the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health, N = 4,775), a representative sample of American adolescents; and the Health and Retirement Study (HRS, N = 8,609), a representative sample of Americans over age 50. We measure prediction accuracy by the “incremental R2”: the gain in coefficient of determination (R2) when the score is added as a covariate to a regression of the phenotype on a set of baseline controls (sex, birth year, their interaction, and 10 principal components of the genetic relatedness matrix).
