3 posts tagged with "GWAS"

Postoperative delirium is a common and serious complication in older people after major surgery. In a new PLOS Medicine paper led by Richard Armstrong, we investigated whether inherited genetic variation helps explain risk of postoperative delirium, and how that risk relates to broader neurocognitive conditions.

Figure: Manhattan plot from the postoperative delirium GWAS, with the genome-wide significant signal concentrated at the chromosome 19 APOE region. Source: Armstrong et al., PLOS Medicine, 2026, Fig. 2 (CC BY 4.0).

Serious complications after major surgery are common, but it is not always clear how far they reflect the immediate stress of surgery versus a person's underlying susceptibility to the same condition outside the postoperative period. In a medRxiv preprint, Richard Armstrong and colleagues use UK Biobank genetics to examine this question for five common postoperative complications.

Figure: Association between postoperative complications and increasing polygenic risk score quintile for related non-postoperative phenotypes. Source: Armstrong et al., medRxiv, 2025, Fig. 4 (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0).