This Simple Blood Test Could Spot Killer Diseases In Your Body

The Scientists in Harvard Medical School says that their new test, giving a 'polygenic risk score', would be the earliest predictor ever. It could be given at birth to spot risk of cancer, heart disease and diabetes. 

'We have known for a long very time that there are more people out there at higher risk for disease based just on their overall genetic variation,' lead author Sekar Kathiresan, a professor of medicine at Harvard, said.

'Now we're able to measure that risk using genomic data in a meaningful way. From a public health perspective, we need to identify these higher-risk segments of the population so we can provide appropriate care.'

Dr Kathiresan's team used data from more than 400,000 individuals in the UK Biobank that holds genomic and medical information from participants of British ancestry.

Of the British participants, eight percent had three times the average risk of developing coronary artery disease, but did not yet show symptoms. 

For breast cancer the polygenic predictor found 1.5 percent had more than triple the risk for the disease. 

The researchers applied a similar approach to polygenic risk scoring for type 2 diabetes, a life-threatening heartbeat problem called atrial fibrillation and inflammatory bowel disease. 

The findings suggest up to 25 million people in the US alone may be at more than triple the normal risk for coronary artery disease, despite not showing symptoms.

Millions more may be at similarly higher risk for other conditions - just because of genetic variations that, until now, have been nearly impossible to spot in advance. 

'Ultimately this is a new type of genetic risk factor,' Dr Kathiresan said.

'We envision polygenic risk scores as a way to identify people at high or low risk for a disease - perhaps as early as birth - and then use that information to target interventions - either lifestyle modifications or treatments - to prevent disease.

'For heart attack, I foresee each patient will have the opportunity to know his or her polygenic risk number in the near future - similar to ways they can know their cholesterol number right now.'  

For each disease, Dr Kathiresan's researchers applied a computational algorithm to combine information from all of the mutations - most of which have an extremely small impact on their own.

This converted them into a single number or polygenic risk score. 

This number could be used to predict a person's chances of getting these diseases based on his or her genome.

Importantly those with bigger scores for coronary artery disease did not necessarily exhibit other warning signs - such as high blood pressure or cholesterol.

Lab member Dr Amit Khera said: 'These individuals - who are at several times the normal risk for having a heart attack just because of the additive effects of many variations - are mostly flying under the radar.

'If they came into my clinical practice, I wouldn't be able to pick them out as high risk with our standard metrics.

'There's a real need to identify these cases so we can target screening and treatments more effectively, and this approach gives us a potential way forward.'

In coronary artery disease alone the algorithm pored over more than 6.6 million locations in the genome to estimate a person's risk of developing the deadly disease.

This which is the most common type of heart disease and a leading cause of death for adults in the US - as well as the UK.

The researchers hope the technique will be used in the clinic for diseases with a genetic component. It could become part of routine care.

CULLED FROM DAILY MAIL