Phenome-wide comorbidity network analysis reveals clinical risk patterns in enthesopathy and enthesitis.

BACKGROUND

Enthesopathy and enthesitis, including rotator cuff disease and other tendon disorders, represent a heterogeneous group of musculoskeletal conditions with complex etiologies. Understanding how systemic health profiles influence their onset remains a critical challenge in musculoskeletal medicine.

METHODS

We conducted a large-scale, phenome-wide comorbidity analysis using longitudinal electronic health records (EHR) from 432,757 UK Biobank participants. Incident cases of peripheral enthesopathies were compared to controls across 434 baseline disease phenotypes. A directed ego network was constructed to link significantly associated comorbidities to the target condition using odds ratio-based associations. Unsupervised clustering via UMAP and DBSCAN identified data-driven comorbidity clusters, which were consolidated into unified endotypes-interpreted as distinct systemic profiles contributing to disease risk. Additionally, metapath-based trajectory analysis was applied to uncover temporally structured multimorbidity chains leading to disease onset.

RESULTS

We identified 183 baseline conditions significantly associated with the future development of enthesopathy (FDR < 0.05). Network clustering revealed eight comorbidity clusters, which were consolidated into four unified endotypes: Metabolic-Psychosomatic, Inflammatory-Multisystem, Mechanical-Injury-driven, and Aging-Intervention-related. Metapath analysis uncovered common three-step disease trajectories, such as metabolic-infectious-musculoskeletal and inflammatory skin-to-joint progressions, highlighting potential mechanistic pathways. These endotypes showed diverse clinical features but shared biological coherence, suggesting that different systemic health profiles can converge to drive tendon-related disease.

CONCLUSIONS

This study introduces a scalable framework for identifying systemic multimorbidity patterns underlying enthesopathy and enthesitis using phenome-wide comorbidity networks. By integrating network clustering and metapath analysis, we uncover interpretable, data-driven endotypes that may inform individualized risk assessment and targeted care strategies. These findings contribute to the growing field of biobank-scale disease modeling and offer a foundation for precision approaches in musculoskeletal medicine.