When will a healthy person have a heart attack or stroke?

A blood test helped to estimate life expectancy

Kirill Stasevich, Compulenta

Usually, when they talk about diagnosing anything, they assume that there is already a problem and it needs to be correctly identified. That is, for example, if you have a bad heart, then you should find out exactly what caused these problems, and do it as early as possible, at the first symptoms.

But isn't it possible, say, to predict a disease even before it happens? For example, to assess the risk of atherosclerosis or cancer before they occur? The task, by the way, is not so unusual: different people's bodies react differently to certain environmental factors, and if one can safely eat fat, then the other needs to carefully monitor how much lipids he eats in order not to exceed a certain norm in any case.

But usually such predictions involve very expensive methods – both in time, technology, and money. Like, say, DNA sequencing and subsequent analysis for risky mutations that worsen fat metabolism or potentially carcinogenic. However, as it turns out, such predictions can be made with the help of old – very old – and very cheap diagnostic methods like a clinical blood test.

It is difficult to find a person who has not had blood taken for such a study at least once in his life – and then to say: a lot of diseases affect the state of the blood, so doctors first of all turn to this analysis. However, the antiquity of the diagnostic method does not mean that we have learned to use 100% of the information it gives us. This was clearly demonstrated by researchers from the Heart Institute at Intermountin Medical Center and Brigham Women's Hospital in Boston (both in the USA). Benjamin Horn and his colleagues turned to blood testing during large-scale clinical trials of the drug rosuvastatin, which is used as a cholesterol-lowering agent.

The study involved 17 thousand people from 26 countries. None of them suffered from cardiovascular diseases, all had normal low-density lipoproteins ("bad" cholesterol), but had elevated levels of C-reactive protein, which accompanies inflammation. This protein can be a harbinger of vascular problems, since such diseases begin again with sluggish inflammation that harms the walls of blood vessels and disrupts metabolism.

The subjects were monitored for five years, and their blood was taken for analysis in advance to assess it according to a special risk scale developed at the Intermountin Medical Center. (The researchers supplemented the usual clinical blood test with a study of its metabolic profile.) As a result, as the authors of the work reported at the congress of the American Association of Heart Researchers in Dallas (USA), they managed to deduce a clear pattern between the result of a blood test and mortality. If the blood "indicated" the minimum values of the risk scale, then the mortality was minimal; if the blood counts reached the middle of the scale, then the probability of death increased by 50%; if a person was particularly unlucky and his indicators on the risk scale were maximum, then the probability of death doubled.

It is worth emphasizing once again that the subjects did not have pronounced problems with the heart and blood vessels, but were predisposed to them. And the merit of the work is that she managed to correctly assess this predisposition, understand what factors need to be paid attention to and how to rank them.

With the help of this technology, it is possible to estimate life expectancy not by the history of heart attacks, but in advance, before the troubles with the vessels appear in an explicit form. And, of course, such a prediction should be used to avoid premature death.

A separate and rather big plus of this method is that it is extremely simple, fast and cheap. We can say that he uses the information that has been lying under our noses for a long time, but we did not pay attention to it. And things got off the ground only when, thanks to the large amount of data collected, it was possible to find a clear pattern between the biochemistry and physiology of blood and the probability of death from cardiovascular problems.

Of course, this is not the first time researchers have turned to blood testing as a means of diagnosing subtle threats to health and life. As an example, let's recall an attempt to use a blood test for the early diagnosis of alzheimer's and to determine the likelihood of suicide in mentally ill people.

Prepared based on the materials of Medical Xpress:
New study helps predict life expectancy in healthy people using complete blood count risk score.

Portal "Eternal youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru21.11.2013