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Scientists have developed a blood test that could predict your chances of death in the next few years.
Predicting your chances of dying may seem like a morbid undertaking, as if you were trying to find a free date in the newspaper for a dance with the Grim Reaper, but this knowledge could potentially be used to postpone this fatal call to curtains by helping people do more. better life choices and guide the treatments they receive.
Scientists led by the Max Planck Institute of Aging Biology in Germany have discovered 14 biomarkers in the blood, independently associated with the deaths of people of all ages, as reported in Nature Communications.
With this knowledge, they then made predictions about a person's risk of death in the next five to ten years. Their predictions have been considerably more accurate than those established using conventional methods, such as blood pressure and cholesterol measurements.
"As researchers on aging, we want to determine the biological age." The age of the calendar does not say much about the general health status of the elderly: a man of 70 years is healthy, another may already be suffering from three diseases, "said in a statement Professor Eline Slagboom, director of the study.
"We now have a set of biomarkers that could help identify vulnerable elderly people, who could then be treated."
The team studied metabolic biomarkers in the blood of 44,000 people aged 18 to 109 in Europe. These biomarkers were known to be involved in various processes, including fatty acid metabolism, fluid balance, glucose degradation, and inflammation. The team then conducted a follow-up study with the same participants, three to 17 years later (during which more than 5,500 participants died), and sought to know how the presence of different biomarkers was associated with risk. mortality.
"Biomarkers give us important information about what's going on in health and disease," said Dr. Amanda Heslegrave, a researcher at the Dementia Research Institute at University College London, who was not directly involved in the study. 'study.
"In this new study, a number of markers are validated and involved in long-term mortality and the authors suggest that more could be, which would be a useful exercise."
However, as acknowledged by the researchers themselves, Dr. Heslegrave added that additional work needs to be done before this research is actually used. On the one hand, the study focused mainly on Europeans, so it is difficult to determine with certainty if the same results can be applied to other ethnic groups.
"Although this study shows that this type of profiling may be useful, they emphasize however that further work is needed to develop an individual level score that would be useful in real-life situations," continued Dr. Heslegrave.
"So, it's an exciting step, but it's not ready yet."
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