Blood Test Detects Premature Death Among Humans

By administering a single blood test, researchers can now detect whether a fairly healthy person is likely to die of pneumonia or sepsis within the next 14 years, according to a recent study.

After conducting a study with 10,000 individuals, researchers identified a molecular byproduct of inflammation, known as GlycA, which supposedly predicts premature deaths from infections in the body, according to a news release.

"As biomedical researchers, we want to help people, and there are few more important things I can think of than identifying apparently healthy individuals who might actually be at increased risk of disease and death," said Michael Inouye, co-senior author of the study, from the University of Melbourne, in Australia.

"We want to short-circuit that risk, and to do that we need to understand what this blood biomarker of disease risk is actually telling us," Inouye added.

The researchers found that "high GlycA levels in the blood indicate a state of chronic inflammation that may arise from low-level chronic infection or an overactive immune response." The inflammation causes damage to the body, which causes individuals to become more vulnerable to infections.

The researchers claimed that additional studies need to be done in order to find the mechanisms in GlycA's link to inflammation and premature death among individuals.

"We still have a lot of work ahead to understand if we can modify the risk in some way," said Johannes Kettunen, co-senior author of the study, from the University of Oulu and the National Institute for Health and Welfare, in Finland. "I personally would not want to know I was at elevated risk of death or disease due to this marker if there was nothing that could be done about it."

For the researchers to plan course treatment, they must know whether high GlycA is the result of chronic, low-level microbacterial infection, or an unusual reaction of the body's own inflammatory response, according to a news release.

This study is a foundation for other researchers to examine the role of GlycA in the human body.

"The more high-quality genomics data we have, linked health records and long-term follow-up, the better our models and predictions will be," Inouye said.

"This study is an example of the progress that can be made when altruistic research volunteers, clinicians, technologists, and data scientists work together, but we have the potential to do much more, and large-scale strategic inter-disciplinary initiatives are vitally needed," he added.

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