Identification of AD genetic comorbidities
In accordance with the prescribed methods, a comprehensive literature search was performed resulting in the identification of 65 phenotypic comorbidities associated with AD (Fig. 1). Of these, 44 displayed GWAS data, meeting the inclusion criteria for further examination. (Fig. 1, Table S1) A total of 15,567,451 patients were included in this analysis. A meticulous quality control assessment was executed, and ultimately, a total of 39,391,465 SNPs were deemed suitable for further analysis. We used conditional QQ plots to detect the pleiotropy between AD and the comorbidities. Significant leftward shifts under various P value cut-offs (0.1, 0.01, 0.001, and 0.0001) were observed in QQ plots for eight diseases, including Crohn's disease (CD), irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), multiple sclerosis (MS), chronic sinusitis (CS), pernicious anaemia, chronic kidney disease, eczema (Fig. 2). The QQ plots for the not significant comorbidities were shown in Figure S1.
Mapping of pleiotropic genes of AD-related genetic comorbidities
We plotted the genetic Manhant plots for AD and its genetic comorbidities in Fig. 3, where the SNP situation for AD was presented in the inside circle and the comorbidities were in the outside circle. We found that chromosomal 6, 11, and 19 consist of the most significant shared loci for AD-related comorbidities. With predefined cut-off criteria (p < 10− 5 and ccFDR < 0.01), we obtained 104 pleiotropic SNPs, which were mapped on 24 genes (Table S2). The pleiotropic SNPs for AD and CKD are all on Chromosome 19 and were mapped to MADD, ENSG00000255197, NR1H3, PSMC3, RAPSN and SPI1 gene. The pleiotropic SNPs between AD and COPD or CS or PA were all located on Chromosome 6 and mapped to HLA-DRB1, HLA-DQA1, HLA-DQB1, HLA-DRB5, HLA-DQB1-AS1 genes, respectively. All pleiotropic SNPs for AD and MS and some for AD and Eczema were on Chromosome 19 and mapped to CEACAM16-AS1, ENSG00000288773, NECTIN2, and BCL3 genes. SNPs for AD and Eczema were on Chromosome 6 and mapped to HLA-DRB1, and HLA-DQA1.
Landscape of AD-related genetic comorbidities
Adding two previously reported genetic comorbidities, posttraumatic stress syndrome (PTSD) and age-related macular degeneration (AMD), we finally identified 10 genetic comorbidities for AD. We mapped the AD genetic comorbidities along with their pleiotropic genes, and pathways on one combined network, as the landscape of AD genetic comorbidities (Fig. 4). The pleiotropic genes of AD-related comorbidities were significantly enriched in GO terms related to biological processes of immune response (e.g., very-low-density lipoprotein particle clearance, chylomicron remnant clearance, positive regulation of cholesterol esterification, MHC class II receptor activity) (Table S3). KEGG enrichment analysis demonstrated that the pleiotropic genes were mainly enriched in asthma, which is strongly mediated by pathways related to immunity. Genes in the HLA family, with the highest degree of interaction, were identified as hub genes (Fig. 4, Figure S2).
Based on further observation, COPD, CS, Eczema as well as PA tend to share genes, such as HLA-DQB1 and HLA-DRB1. In contrast, multimorbid relationships of CKD and AD, PTSD and AD tend to share immune-related pathways. The detrimental role of CKD on the brain has been previously reported, being CKD as a pro-inflammatory dysmetabolic state that is associated with brain dysfunction. SPI1, for example, a transcriptional activator that may be specifically involved in the differentiation or activation of macrophages or B- cells. MS4A2, the pleiotropic gene for PTSD and AD, was shown to mediate the secretion of important lymphokines. Although mediated by different genes, the identified comorbidities were all closely related to immune responses. Further, we also mapped the pleiotropic genes to the human PPI network and found that most of them connected closely with others (Fig. 5A), indicating that they may conduct biological functions synergistically.
Function and expression analysis for pleiotropic genes
Essential genes were reported to have a tendency to encode hub proteins in the human interactome and play important roles in maintaining normal developmental and/or physiological functions. It is curious that if pleiotropic genes could be essential genes. Here, we obtained 70310 essential genes, which were human orthologs of mouse genes whose disruptions are embryonically or postnatally lethal. We found that SPI1 was the only essential gene among pleiotropic genes (Fig. 5B). These results indicated that most pleiotropic genes were functionally peripheral in the human interactome, and their mutations are compatible with survival into reproductive years so that these comorbidity phenotypes are preserved in a population. Housekeeping genes, also known as constitutive genes, are a class of genes that are expressed at relatively constant levels in all cells and under normal physiological conditions. These genes are responsible for carrying out fundamental cellular functions that are essential for the maintenance of basic cellular processes. To examine whether pleiotropic genes tend to be housekeeping genes, we summarized the number of tissues each gene was expressed in based on the gene expression data of 53 tissues in ScRNA-seq data from GTEx. We found that pleiotropic genes, such as APOE and HLA-DRB1 as well as PWMC3, tend to be expressed in more tissues (Figure S3).
Identification of potential diagnostic biomarkers for AD from AD-related comorbidities
In order to find new biomarkers for AD, we tested the predictive efficiency of the above pleiotropic genes on two independent AD microarray datasets, respectively. Diagnostic test results for pleiotropic genes of different comorbidities have been presented in Fig. 5C. APOC1 (the pleiotropic gene for AD and AMD, average AUC = 0.65), MADD, NR1H3, PSMC3 (the pleiotropic gene for AD and CKD, all average AUC > 0.6), and KCTD2, MS4A2 (the pleiotropic gene for AD and PTSD, all average AUC > 0.6) showed good diagnostic value in AD microarray datasets. However, the AUC values of the rest genes were not significant.
The number of the pleiotropic genes with predicted potential in our study was relatively low, we, therefore, searched the reported biomarkers of the 10 genetic comorbidities from public databases and examined their prediction accuracy (Table S4). Based on a logistic regression model, 50 genes passed the AUC of 0.8 on both validation datasets (Fig. 6A). Notably, ACTB and YWHAZ showed good prediction accuracy for five different comorbidities (ACTB for CKD, COPD, CD, MS, PTSD and YWHAZ for COPD, CS, CD, Eczema and MS) while MSC for four comorbidities (COPD, CD, Eczema, MS). Interestingly, > 10 of these biomarkers were mapped on Synapse, Cell junction, and Vesicle pathways in GO annotation on the cellular component level (Fig. 6B). No overlap was found among pathways enriched by pleiotropic genes and biomarker candidates.