Disentangling genetic and environmental risk factors for individual diseases from multiplex comorbidity networks.

ABSTRACT: Most disorders are caused by a combination of multiple genetic and/or environmental factors. If two diseases are caused by the same molecular mechanism, they tend to co-occur in patients. Here we provide a quantitative method to disentangle how much genetic or environmental risk factors contribute to the pathogenesis of 358 individual diseases, respectively. We pool data on genetic, pathway-based, and toxicogenomic disease-causing mechanisms with disease co-occurrence data obtained from almost two million patients. From this data we construct a multiplex network where nodes represent disorders that are connected by links that either represent phenotypic comorbidity of the patients or the involvement of a certain molecular mechanism. From the similarity of phenotypic and mechanism-based net

SUBMITTER: Klimek P 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5180180 | biostudies-literature | 2016 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature