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Global and local genetic overlap among ME/CFS, irritable bowel syndrome and psychiatric traits: a hypothesis-generating analysis
Background. Myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS) and irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) frequently co-occur following infection, yet shared genetic architecture at the locus level has not been systematically characterised. Aims. To estimate global and local genetic correlations between ME/CFS (including infection-onset subgroup), IBS, major depressive disorder (MDD) and loneliness/isolation, and characterise ME/CFS cell-type heritability enrichment. Method. GWAS summary statistics: DecodeME (15,579 ME/CFS; 9,738 infection-onset), FinnGen R9 (9,296 IBS), PGC MDD Wave 2 (45,396) and UK Biobank loneliness (N=455,364). LDSC for global correlations; LAVA for local correlations across 2,495 loci; MAGMA for cell-type enrichment (Descartes Human atlas); coloc.abf for colocalisation. Results. All pairwise global correlations were significant after Bonferroni correction, including ME/CFS-all-MDD (rg=0.598, 95% CI 0.46-0.74) and ME/CFS-all-IBS (rg=0.573, 0.39-0.75). Of 4,232 local tests, 16 reached FDR<0.05; two loneliness×MDD loci were Bonferroni-significant. ME/CFS-MDD showed three FDR-significant local correlations, but all were boundary-estimated and non-Bonferroni-significant. A borderline infection-onset ME/CFS-IBS signal occurred at chr12q24.22 (ρ=1.000, FDR=0.046), but colocalisation did not support a shared causal variant (PP.H4=0.007). ME/CFS heritability was enriched in inhibitory neurons (P=1.210×−7) and enteric nervous system neurons (FDR=0.004), with no FDR-significant peripheral immune cell-type enrichment in the atlas used. Conclusions. High global ME/CFS-MDD correlation was accompanied by limited, boundary-estimated, non-Bonferroni-robust local sharing; the data do not support reducing ME/CFS to depression at the genetic-architecture level. Neural enrichment, including enteric nervous system neurons, supports involvement of neural components in ME/CFS susceptibility without excluding immune mechanisms. A borderline ME/CFS-IBS signal at a NOS1-containing region generated hypotheses requiring replication.
### Competing Interest Statement
The authors have declared no competing interest.
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All summary statistics analysed in this study are publicly available from the original consortia: DecodeME (doi:10.1101/2025.08.06.25333109); FinnGen R9 (https://storage.googleapis.com/finngen-public-data-r9/); PGC MDD (https://pgc.unc.edu); UK Biobank loneliness/isolation (https://gwas.mrcieu.ac.uk; ukb-b-8476). Full GWAS-level summary statistics including p-values, effect directions and standard errors for all tested markers are available from the original consortia as listed. All analysis code and derived intermediate output files are available at the public GitHub repository https://github.com/gamie7/mecfs-ibs-cross-trait-analysis, archived at Zenodo under DOI 10.5281/zenodo.20596388. The repository includes the LAVA univariate and bivariate results, MAGMA gene-property output, coloc input/output and regional plot input, plus an annotated reproducibility document specifying software versions and execution order.
<https://github.com/gamie7/mecfs-ibs-cross-trait-analysis>