Understanding multimorbidity requires sign-disease networks and higher-order interactions, a perspective.

Background: Count scores, disease clustering, and pairwise associations between diseases remain ubiquitous in multimorbidity research despite two major shortcomings: they yield no insight into plausible mechanisms underlying multimorbidity, and they ignore higher-order interactions such as effect modification.

Objectives: We argue that two components are currently missing but vital to develop novel multimorbidity metrics. Firstly, networks should be constructed which consists simultaneously of signs, symptoms, and diseases, since only then could they yield insight into plausible shared biological mechanisms underlying diseases.Secondly, learning pairwise associations is insufficient to fully characterize the correlations in a system. That is, synergistic (e.g., cooperative or antagonistic) effects are widespread in complex systems, where two or more elements combined give a larger or smaller effect than the sum of their individual effects. It can even occur that pairs of symptoms have no pairwise associations whatsoever, but in combination have a significant association. Therefore, higher-order interactions should be included in networks used to study multimorbidity, resulting in so-called hypergraphs.

Methods: We illustrate our argument using a synthetic Bayesian Network model of symptoms, signs and diseases, composed of pairwise and higher-order interactions. We simulate network interventions on both individual and population levels and compare the ground-truth outcomes with the predictions from pairwise associations.

Conclusion: We find that, when judged purely from the pairwise associations, interventions can have unexpected 'side-effects' or the most opportune intervention could be missed. The hypergraph uncovers links missed in pairwise networks, giving a more complete overview of sign and disease associations.