July 11, 2007
Computer Model Maps Complex Diseases
By using epidemiological data from 1.5 million patients, researchers at Columbia University have mapped the overlap between 161 different diseases. Among their findings is a strong overlap between schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and autism. The data suggests that these three diseases may have a shared group of genes.
Using health records from the Columbia University Medical Center, the researchers examined the likelihood that a patient with one genetically complex disease--for example, diabetes--also had one of the 160 other diseases under study, such as an autoimmune disorder. The researchers concluded that certain groups of genes can predispose a person to multiple diseases, while others can predispose a person to one disease while protecting against another.
They did not look at gene expression or DNA sequence data in any of the patients, so the study provides no specific evidence that diseases with a tendency to occur together share common genetic risk factors. (A person with a psychiatric illness might develop diabetes because of poor eating habits, not because the same genes cause both diseases.) But in general, inferences can me made that the disease correlations are caused by shared genes rather than environmental effects, because their sample size was so large and the correlations were so strong.
This project is one of only a few that combine bioinformatics with medical informatics to discover new possible disease correlations. The researchers have encouraged other scientists to use their map to further investigate the genetic bases of the diseases they studied.
Article from PNAS
Probing genetic overlap among complex human phenotypes