Attributable risk is a way of measuring prevalence of a disease or condition and refers to how many cases in a population of exposed individuals can be directly linked to that exposure. It’s a calculation made in biostatistics. Attributable risk is usually presented in percentages, such as stating that the attributable risk of smoking for lung cancer is 85% — that is, 85% of all lung cancers are caused by smoking. In genetics, the “exposure” is how often a specific genetic variant or mutation occurs. So the attributable risk of a particular condition that can be caused by that variant or mutation would be the percentage of people who have the condition out of the total people who are estimated to have that variant (its frequency in the population).
