Finding potentially new multimorbidity patterns of psychiatric and somatic diseases: exploring the use of literature-based discovery in primary care research

Background Multimorbidity, the co-occurrence of two or more chronic medical conditions within a single individual, is increasingly becoming part of daily care of general medical practice. Literature-based discovery may help to investigate the patterns of multimorbidity and to integrate medical knowledge for improving healthcare delivery for individuals with co-occurring chronic conditions.

Objective To explore the usefulness of literature-based discovery in primary care research through the key-case of finding associations between psychiatric and somatic diseases relevant to general practice in a large biomedical literature database (Medline).

Methods By using literature based discovery for matching disease profiles as vectors in a high-dimensional associative concept space, co-occurrences of a broad spectrum of chronic medical conditions were matched for their potential in biomedicine. An experimental setting was chosen in parallel with expert evaluations and expert meetings to assess performance and to generate targets for integrating literature-based discovery in multidisciplinary medical research of psychiatric and somatic disease associations.

Results Through stepwise reductions a reference set of 21 945 disease combinations was generated, from which a set of 166 combinations between psychiatric and somatic diseases was selected and assessed by text mining and expert evaluation.

Conclusions Literature-based discovery tools generate specific patterns of associations between psychiatric and somatic diseases: one subset was appraised as promising for further research; the other subset surprised the experts, leading to intricate discussions and further eliciting of frameworks of biomedical knowledge. These frameworks enable us to specify targets for further developing and integrating literature-based discovery in multidisciplinary research of general practice, psychology and psychiatry, and epidemiology.