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. cellular
networks, population-level statistics Comorbidity, Diseases,
Genes EMBO and Nature Publishing Group This is an Open Access
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Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 license
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/), which
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