Scraping for asthma
Researchers from the Mount Clinic Mount Sinai Health System has isolated a genetic biomarker of bronchial asthma. The material is taken by scraping the nasal mucosa with a conventional cotton swab. This inexpensive diagnostic test can accurately diagnose bronchial asthma and differentiate it from other diseases of the respiratory system, such as allergic rhinitis, chronic obstructive bronchitis, acute respiratory diseases and cystic fibrosis of the lungs.
Bronchial asthma at an early stage can be quite difficult to diagnose, because the symptoms change over time and may be associated with other respiratory diseases. Accurate and timely diagnosis will allow you to start treatment on time and reduce the risk of severe course and seizures.
Currently, tests on the functions of external respiration, in particular, spirometry, are used as the main method of diagnosing bronchial asthma. However, they require special skills and equipment that primary care doctors do not always have. In addition, having only spirometry in the arsenal, asthma is difficult to differentiate from other respiratory diseases. Nasal scraping, which does not require special skill and takes several seconds in time, and the subsequent determination of asthma biomarkers in it, give an accurate answer: there is asthma or there is none. The researchers loaded the data into a special program and demonstrated the capabilities of machine learning.
The study involved 190 patients with mild or moderate asthma, as well as patients with acute respiratory infections, chronic obstructive bronchitis, allergic rhinitis and healthy volunteers. All of them underwent nasal scraping followed by RNA sequencing of the resulting material. An algorithm based on machine learning determined asthma biomarkers consisting of 90 genes.
Biomarkers have demonstrated high predictive value. A fast and inexpensive test based on it, after verification in large prospective studies, can be introduced into clinical practice as a standard for the diagnosis of bronchial asthma.
Article by G. Pandey et al. A Nasal Brush-based Classifier of Asthma Identified by Machine Learning Analysis of NASALRNA Sequence Data is published in the journal Scientific Reports.
Aminat Adzhieva, portal "Eternal Youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru based on Mount Sinai materials: Mount Sinai Team Diagnoses Asthma With Nasal Brush Test.