Comorbidity is the increased chance of a patient to develop certain disease knowing that he already has another one; in contrast to complications comorbidity is usually caused by some common factor like individual genetical background, which promotes onset of both diseases. The presence of comorbid disorders causes difficulty in the diagnostics and therapy selection. This is important challenge for health system. As the genetic predisposition to majority of diseases is determined by a single gene but rather than several interacting genes genes, common association of a genetic variant with several disease prone phenotypes may be an important source of comorbidity. Such contribution is usually weak and shadowed by epigenetics, social and other factors. Machine learning methods allow identification of interacting factors in given the data is massive enouth. We plan to use UK Biobank data as a dataset large enough to establish statistical linkes that cannout be detected by traditional statistical models because they relate to a large number of weakly contributing factors. The project will bring about identification of correlated diseases, possibly shed light on molecular mechanisms of their correlation, would help to establish factors increasing the likelihood of such diseases development.
The main objectives of this study are:
1) Create list of potentially comorbid diseases
2) Find factors that influence on comorbidity and their importance.
3) Create machine learning models to predict occurrence of comorbid diseases (predict diseases risk using genetics and socio-demographic data)
The project will require 24 months. In the course of the study we would generate a number of hypotheses to identify sets of factors affecting the increased likelihood of comorbid diseases which could be tested in the experiment and used for medical purposes. Also we are going to create a software tool that can serve not only for therapeutic purposes in medicine (to predict risks for patients), but also to generate hypotheses for further research.The planned study agrees with the stated aims of UK Biobank as it is a “research intended to improve the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of illness and the promotion of health throughout society”.