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Common genetic associations between age-related diseases
16 April 2021
In this study we identified four disease clusters from 116 diseases in UK Biobank data, defined by their age-of-onset profiles, and found that diseases with the same onset profile are genetically more similar, suggesting a common etiology.
Diseases with the same age profile share genetic associations, which cannot be explained by disease categories, co-occurrences or mediated pleiotropy and thus reflects a common etiology.
We further characterized these shared associations and compared the variants associated with diseases at different ages and identified different evolutionary characteristics, supporting the mutation accumulation and antagonistic pleiotropy theories of aging.