According to Estonian researchers, it would be possible to predict the risk of death at 5 years in healthy people. This with the help of a simple blood test.
Would you like to know the time of your death? To this question worthy of a science fiction film, European researchers claim to be able to provide an answer. In a study published on February 25 in the scientific journal Plos Medicine, a team of Estonian scientists claim to have developed a blood test that would predict in healthy people their risk of death within 5 years.
To arrive at such a result, they studied blood samples from 17,000 people. And they found that of the 684 people who died, all had similar rates of four biomarkers. These are albumin, a marker of hepatic and renal function, alpha-1-acid glycoprotein, also produced by the liver and which plays a role of transporter in the body, citrate which is involved in cycles production of energy in cells, and very low density lipoproteins, markers of cardiovascular risk.
And the deaths were not linked to a particular pathology, but to heart attacks, cancers or even other diseases. The researchers, Estonian and Finnish, have just published their work in the journal Plos Medicine. They were themselves surprised to see that the combination of these four markers predicted a risk of death, regardless of any pathology.
According to them, the interest of such a test is to bring people, apparently in good health, to consult a doctor and possibly to undergo treatment for an underlying pathology. The researchers point out, however, that more studies are needed to confirm their results.
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