"The large number of families in this study allowed us to obtain precise estimates of genetic and environmental correlations, representing the common causes of multiple different diseases," said Kanix Wang, a graduate student at UChicago and lead author of the study. "Using these shared genetic and environmental causes, we created a new system to classify diseases based on their intrinsic biology."
Genetic similarities between diseases tended to be stronger than their corresponding environmental correlations. For the majority of neuropsychiatric diseases, such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and substance abuse, however, environmental correlations are nearly as strong as genetic ones. This suggests there are elements of the shared, family environment that could be changed to help prevent these disorders.
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The researchers also compared their results to the widely used International Classification of Diseases Version 9 (ICD-9) and found additional, unexpected groupings of diseases. For example, type 1 diabetes, an autoimmune endocrine disease, has a high genetic correlation with hypertension, a disease of the circulatory system. The researchers also saw high genetic correlations across common, apparently dissimilar diseases such as asthma, allergic rhinitis, osteoarthritis and dermatitis.
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