A simple blood test could help predict when you will die, scientists have discovered.
Specific chemicals found in the blood – called biomarkers – can help determine how well a person is aging and their risk of developing age-related diseases including cancer and heart disease.
Researchers at Boston University used biomarker data collected from almost 5,000 people. They then compared that with the volunteers’ health, considering the conditions they developed, over an eight-year period.
They discovered 26 different markers that predicted both healthy and unhealthy futures, including biomarkers that determine a person’s risk of heart disease, cancer, stroke and type 2 diabetes.
The test could mean people will be able to identify their risk of disease early on and make changes to their lifestyle to avoid them, the authors said.
Lead author, Professor Paola Sebastiani, of the university’s school of public health, said: “Many prediction and risk scores already exist for predicting specific diseases like heart disease.”
“Here, though, we are taking another step by showing that particular patterns of groups of markers can indicate how well a person is aging and his or her risk for specific age-related syndromes and diseases.”
She said the findings could make future studies into new medical treatments for age-related diseases more plausible, as clinical trials “may not have to wait years and years for clinical outcomes to occur”.
Instead, trials may be able to rely on marker signatures much earlier “to detect the effects, or absence of effects, that they are searching for.”
Doctor Thomas Perls, of the university’s school of medicine, who also led the research, added: “We can now detect and measure thousands of biomarkers from a small amount of blood, with the idea of eventually being able to predict who is at risk of a wide range of diseases — long before any clinical signs become apparent.”
“Following all the recent advances in genetics, the science of proteomics and metabolomics is the next big revolution in predictive medicine and drug discovery.”