Disease Networks

Via Art De Vany’s blog - Network Medicine — From Obesity to the “Diseasome”

This is an interesting article describing disease networks. First, it looks at the obesity network within communities.

The authors observed that when two persons perceived each other as friends, if one friend became obese during a given time interval, the other friend’s chances of following suit increased by 171%. Among pairs of adult siblings, if one sibling became obese, the chance that the other would become obese increased by 40%. The results of this study also indicate that obesity is clustered in communities. For example, the risk that the friend of a friend of an obese person would be obese was about 20% higher in the observed network than in a random network; this effect vanished only by the fourth degree of separation.

Little surprise that we will tend to be like our friends. Wealthy people tend to hang out with wealthy people, beautiful people with beautiful people, fitness buffs with other fitness buffs, and so on and so forth. I think this is one reason that many people are scared of losing their weight. If someone is obese and has friends that are obese, what effect will that have on their friendships if they lost weight? Will they have to make the difficult decision to make new friends because the old ones don’t fit into their new lifestyle? Food for thought…

The article then goes on to discuss disease networks within the body.

Although they are often treated separately, most human diseases are not independent of each other. Many diseases are associated with the breakdown of functional modules that are best described as subnetworks of a complex network connecting many cellular components.

Again, no big surprise here. It’s well-known that obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure, and numerous other disorders tend to go hand-in-hand. It makes sense that when one deviates from the natural patterns of the body that all kinds of systems go haywire. Everything from the pancreas to the fingernails are connected into a single system known as the body, not functioning as disparate systems as so many seem to believe.

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