Novel disease syndromes unveiled by integrative multiscale network analysis of diseases sharing molecular effectors and comorbidities

Abstract Background Forty-two percent of patients experience disease comorbidity, contributing substantially to mortality rates and increased healthcare costs. Yet, the possibility of underlying shared mechanisms for diseases remains not well established, and few studies have confirmed their molecular predictions with clinical datasets. Methods In this work, we integrated genome-wide association study (GWAS) associating diseases and single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) with transcript regulatory activity from expression quantitative trait loci (eQTL). This allowed novel mechanistic insights for noncoding and intergenic regions. We then analyzed pairs of SNPs across diseases to identify shared molecular effectors robust to multiple test correction (False Discovery Rate FDReRNA  1.5, FDRcomorbidity