Multimorbidity study across neurodegenerative diseases

An AI-driven study of multimorbidity across Alzheimer’s disease, ALS, and frontotemporal dementia.

An Artificial Intelligence-Driven Multimorbidity Framework Reveals a Shared Metabolic and Immune Core Across Alzheimer’s Disease, Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, and Frontotemporal Dementia

Biomedicines · 14(2), 444

Study overview

Used SemNet 2.0, built from more than 35 million PubMed abstracts, to rank disease, syndrome, and drug concepts associated with Alzheimer’s disease, ALS, and frontotemporal dementia.
Compared high-ranking disease concepts across disease pairs and organized them into 13 mechanistic categories. Three human evaluators reviewed high-importance category assignments, with reported agreement of κ = 0.88.

Key findings

The literature-derived analysis suggested a shared metabolic and immune/inflammatory core across the three diseases.
Cardiovascular categories were comparatively prominent for Alzheimer’s disease, while environmental-toxin and neuromuscular categories stood out for ALS.
These associations generate hypotheses rather than establish causation or clinical comorbidity rates. Some neuropsychiatric concepts may reflect disease-related symptoms rather than independent conditions.

Figures

Sunburst chart of multimorbidity categories shared across Alzheimer’s disease, ALS, and FTD

Figure 3 — Disease-based multimorbidity intersections showing a shared metabolic and immune core.Source: Iyer et al. (2026), Figure 3 · CC BY 4.0

Grouped bar chart comparing 13 categories of high-ranking disease concepts across ALS–FTD, AD–FTD, and AD–ALS intersections

Figure 4 — Category shares within each pairwise disease intersection. Metabolic, immune/inflammatory, and neuropsychiatric concepts account for the largest fractions.Source: Iyer et al. (2026), Figure 4 · CC BY 4.0

Heatmap ranking 13 systemic categories across Alzheimer’s disease, ALS, FTD, and their pairwise intersections

Figure 8 — Integrated multimorbidity landscape. Cells show each category’s ordinal priority within a disease or intersection, with 1 indicating the highest rank.Source: Iyer et al. (2026), Figure 8 · CC BY 4.0