A network approach for the comorbidities of HIV/AIDS in Taiwan.

Comorbidities are the presence of one or more additional disorders or diseases co-occurring with a primary disease or disorder. The purpose of this study is to identify diseases that co-occur with HIV/AIDS and analyze the gender differences. Data was collected from 536 HIV/AIDS outpatient department medical records out of 1,377,469 outpatient department medical records from 1997 to 2010 in Taiwan. In this study, the comorbidity relationships are presented in the phenotypic disease network (PDN), and ϕ -correlation is used to measure the distance between two diseases on the network.