Unveiling the molecular basis of disease co-occurrence: towards personalized comorbidity profiles

Abstract

Comorbidity is an impactful medical problem that is attracting increasing attention in healthcare and biomedical research. However, little is known about the molecular processes leading to the development of a specific disease in patients affected by other conditions. We present a disease interaction network inferred from similarities in patients molecular profiles, which significantly recapitulates epidemiologically documented comorbidities, providing the basis for their interpretation at a molecular level. Furthermore, expanding on the analysis of subgroups of patients with similar molecular profiles, our approach discovers comorbidity relations not previously described, implicates distinct genes in such relations, and identifies drugs whose side effects are potentially associated to the observed comorbidities.