Abstract
The impact of disease-causing defects is often not limited to the products of a mutated gene but, thanks to interactions between the molecular components, may also affect other cellular functions, resulting in potential comorbidity effects. By combining information on cellular interactions, disease–gene associations, and population-level disease patterns extracted from Medicare data, we find statistically significant correlations between the underlying structure of cellular networks and disease comorbidity patterns in the human population. Our results indicate that such a combination of population-level data and cellular network information could help build novel hypotheses about disease mechanisms.
Keywords
cellular networks, population-level statistics
Subject Categories
Comorbidity, Diseases, Genes
Disciplines
Physics
Publisher
EMBO and Nature Publishing Group
Publication Date
4-2009
Rights Information
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Rights Holder
© 2007 EMBO and Nature Publishing Group
Permanent URL
Recommended Citation
Park, Juyong; Lee, Deok-Sun; Christakis, Nicholas A.; and Barabási, Albert-László, "The impact of cellular networks on disease comorbidity" (2009). Physics Faculty Publications. Paper 109. http://hdl.handle.net/2047/d20000682
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Notes
Originally published in Molecular Systems Biology 2009, 5:262. doi:10.1038/msb.2009.16