THE TELEGRAPH, UK – A blood test can predict 67 major diseases including cancer and dementia up to 10 years early, scientists have shown.
Experts discovered that dozens of diseases have distinctive protein signatures which act like fingerprints, flagging up the presence of conditions up to a decade before diagnosis.
Diseases which can be spotted include motor neurone disease, diabetes, heart failure, leukaemia, cataracts, several cancers, gout, liver cirrhosis, arthritis and angina.
The discovery was made after studying the thousands of proteins in the blood plasma of more than 40,000 participants of the UK Biobank and comparing it to information on future diagnoses from electronic health records.
Machine learning was then used to search for groups of proteins which signalled the onset of certain diseases.
The protein markers were better at predicting disease than current testing such as blood cell counts, cholesterol levels, kidney function or blood sugar.
Prof Claudia Langenberg, the lead author and director of the Precision Healthcare University Research Institute (PHURI) at Queen Mary University of London, said: “The protein panels we identified pick up people who are at high risk of developing a specific disease in the future.
“Measuring one protein for a specific reason, such as troponin to diagnose a heart attack, is standard clinical practice.
“We are extremely excited about the opportunity to identify new markers for screening and diagnosis from the thousands of proteins circulating and now measurable in human blood.
“In theory, such a test could be done in a clinical or community setting, including at GP practices.
“However, before any implementation, we first need to validate the proteins in different populations and develop clinical grade assays that measure these reliably, and cost effectively” …
