Clinical AD diagnosis has been the focus of most genome-wide association studies of Alzheimer’s disease. Memory performance has received less attention even though it is a strong endophenotype for AD and is highly heritable. A major challenge in performing large-scale genomic analysis of memory performance is that many studies use disparate measures to quantify memory abilities, making integration and meta-analysis challenging.

We conducted a cross-ancestry GWAS on memory performance (in 27,633 participants) and memory decline (in 22,365 participants; 129,201 observations) by leveraging harmonized cognitive data from four aging cohorts. Memory scores were harmonized across cohorts and genotypes underwent standard quality control and imputation (genome build 38). Memory performance and decline GWAS were conducted in each cohort and ancestry group (i.e., NHW or NHB) separately. NHW and NHB memory impairment and memory decline GWAS were followed with an ancestry-specific fixed effects meta-analysis. Following ancestry-specific meta-analyses, a cross-ancestry fixed effects meta-analysis was performed across NHW and NHB GWAS for baseline memory performance and decline, and variants were filtered to only include those present in both ancestry groups.