A global overview of genetically interpretable multimorbidities among common diseases in the UK Biobank

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Abstract

Background

Multimorbidities greatly increase the global health burdens, but the landscapes of their genetic risks have not been systematically investigated.

Methods

We used the hospital inpatient data of 385,335 patients in the UK Biobank to investigate the multimorbid relations among 439 common diseases. Post-GWAS analyses were performed to identify multimorbidity shared genetic risks at the genomic loci, network, as well as overall genetic architecture levels. We conducted network decomposition for the networks of genetically interpretable multimorbidities to detect the hub diseases and the involved molecules and functions in each module.

Results

In total, 11,285 multimorbidities among 439 common diseases were identified, and 46% of them were genetically interpretable at the loci, network, or overall genetic architecture levels. Multimorbidities affecting the same and different physiological systems displayed different patterns of the shared genetic components, with the former more likely to share loci-level genetic components while the latter more likely to share network-level genetic components. Moreover, both the loci- and network-level genetic components shared by multimorbidities converged on cell immunity, protein metabolism, and gene silencing. Furthermore, we found that the genetically interpretable multimorbidities tend to form network modules, mediated by hub diseases and featuring physiological categories. Finally, we showcased how hub diseases mediating the multimorbidity modules could help provide useful insights for the genetic contributors of multimorbidities.

Conclusions

Our results provide a systematic resource for understanding the genetic predispositions of multimorbidities and indicate that hub diseases and converged molecules and functions may be the key for treating multimorbidities. We have created an online database that facilitates researchers and physicians to browse, search, or download these multimorbidities ( https://multimorbidity.comp-sysbio.org).

Supplementary Information

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s13073-021-00927-6.

Related collections

Most cited references 59

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ANNOVAR: functional annotation of genetic variants from high-throughput sequencing data

Kai Wang, Mingyao Li, Hakon Hakonarson (2010)

High-throughput sequencing platforms are generating massive amounts of genetic variation data for diverse genomes, but it remains a challenge to pinpoint a small subset of functionally important variants. To fill these unmet needs, we developed the ANNOVAR tool to annotate single nucleotide variants (SNVs) and insertions/deletions, such as examining their functional consequence on genes, inferring cytogenetic bands, reporting functional importance scores, finding variants in conserved regions, or identifying variants reported in the 1000 Genomes Project and dbSNP. ANNOVAR can utilize annotation databases from the UCSC Genome Browser or any annotation data set conforming to Generic Feature Format version 3 (GFF3). We also illustrate a ‘variants reduction’ protocol on 4.7 million SNVs and indels from a human genome, including two causal mutations for Miller syndrome, a rare recessive disease. Through a stepwise procedure, we excluded variants that are unlikely to be causal, and identified 20 candidate genes including the causal gene. Using a desktop computer, ANNOVAR requires ∼4 min to perform gene-based annotation and ∼15 min to perform variants reduction on 4.7 million variants, making it practical to handle hundreds of human genomes in a day. ANNOVAR is freely available at http://www.openbioinformatics.org/annovar/ .

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Second-generation PLINK: rising to the challenge of larger and richer datasets

Christopher Chang, Carson Chow, Laurent Tellier … (2015)

PLINK 1 is a widely used open-source C/C++ toolset for genome-wide association studies (GWAS) and research in population genetics. However, the steady accumulation of data from imputation and whole-genome sequencing studies has exposed a strong need for even faster and more scalable implementations of key functions. In addition, GWAS and population-genetic data now frequently contain probabilistic calls, phase information, and/or multiallelic variants, none of which can be represented by PLINK 1's primary data format. To address these issues, we are developing a second-generation codebase for PLINK. The first major release from this codebase, PLINK 1.9, introduces extensive use of bit-level parallelism, O(sqrt(n))-time/constant-space Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium and Fisher's exact tests, and many other algorithmic improvements. In combination, these changes accelerate most operations by 1-4 orders of magnitude, and allow the program to handle datasets too large to fit in RAM. This will be followed by PLINK 2.0, which will introduce (a) a new data format capable of efficiently representing probabilities, phase, and multiallelic variants, and (b) extensions of many functions to account for the new types of information. The second-generation versions of PLINK will offer dramatic improvements in performance and compatibility. For the first time, users without access to high-end computing resources can perform several essential analyses of the feature-rich and very large genetic datasets coming into use.

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The UK Biobank resource with deep phenotyping and genomic data

Clare Bycroft, Colin Freeman, Desislava Petkova … (2018)

The UK Biobank project is a prospective cohort study with deep genetic and phenotypic data collected on approximately 500,000 individuals from across the United Kingdom, aged between 40 and 69 at recruitment. The open resource is unique in its size and scope. A rich variety of phenotypic and health-related information is available on each participant, including biological measurements, lifestyle indicators, biomarkers in blood and urine, and imaging of the body and brain. Follow-up information is provided by linking health and medical records. Genome-wide genotype data have been collected on all participants, providing many opportunities for the discovery of new genetic associations and the genetic bases of complex traits. Here we describe the centralized analysis of the genetic data, including genotype quality, properties of population structure and relatedness of the genetic data, and efficient phasing and genotype imputation that increases the number of testable variants to around 96 million. Classical allelic variation at 11 human leukocyte antigen genes was imputed, resulting in the recovery of signals with known associations between human leukocyte antigen alleles and many diseases.

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Author and article information

Contributors

Guiying Dong: dongguiying2017@163.com

Jianfeng Feng: jffeng@fudan.edu.cn

Fengzhu Sun: fsun@usc.edu

Jingqi Chen: jingqichen@fudan.edu.cn

Xing-Ming Zhao:

ORCID: http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4531-3970

xmzhao@fudan.edu.cn

Journal

Journal ID (nlm-ta): Genome Med

Journal ID (iso-abbrev): Genome Med

Title: Genome Medicine

Publisher: BioMed Central (London )

ISSN (Electronic): 1756-994X

Publication date (Electronic): 5 July 2021

Publication date PMC-release: 5 July 2021

Publication date Collection: 2021

Volume: 13

Electronic Location Identifier: 110

Affiliations

[1 ]GRID grid.8547.e, ISNI 0000 0001 0125 2443, Institute of Science and Technology for Brain-inspired Intelligence, , Fudan University, ; Shanghai, 200433 China

[2 ]GRID grid.8547.e, ISNI 0000 0001 0125 2443, MOE Key Laboratory of Computational Neuroscience and Brain-Inspired Intelligence, and MOE Frontiers Center for Brain Science, , Fudan University, ; Shanghai, 200433 China

[3 ]Zhangjiang Fudan International Innovation Center, Shanghai, 200433 China

[4 ]GRID grid.42505.36, ISNI 0000 0001 2156 6853, Molecular and Computational Biology Program, , University of Southern California, ; Los Angeles, CA 90089 USA

Author information

Xing-Ming Zhao http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4531-3970

Article

Publisher ID: 927

DOI: 10.1186/s13073-021-00927-6

PMC ID: 8258962

PubMed ID: 34225788

SO-VID: 9432a61c-e04d-467b-a1f4-00b7513d4e1a

License:

Open AccessThis article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver ( http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data.

History

Date received : 12 March 2021

Date accepted : 22 June 2021