New Blood Test Can Predict Your Risk of Death In 10 Years

There is no way of predicting what the future holds for you but you might just be able to find out if you’re going to die in the next ten years, thanks to a new blood test scientists have discovered.

Performing blood tests is a common procedure during medical examination to help doctors check for certain illnesses or conditions or even determine if the organs are working properly. But this new study published in Nature Communications found that a new blood test can predict mortality in 10 years with an accuracy rate of 80 percent.

A team of scientists in Germany developed this groundbreaking test.

While it’s horrifying for someone to know when they’ll die, scientists say this would actually help those who are at risk, warning them of what’s to come so they can change their lifestyle for the better.

To arrive at their findings, scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Biology of Ageing collected blood samples from 44,168 patients of European descent, between the ages of 18 and 109, with their health events for up to sixteen years being monitored.

Among those patients, 5,512 of them died during the follow-up studies. Studying the data, which had measurements of 226 metabolic biomarkers, researchers found there were 14 of these biomarkers associated with the patients’ death.

The new blood test was able to beat the accuracy of predictions using conventional risk factors, like BMI, blood pressure, etc.

The team once again studied the biomarkers to find out how well they can predict the risk of mortality, this time involving more than 7,600 Finnish patients in 1997. During follow-up, 1,213 participants have di ed and the 14 biomarkers accurately predicted the deaths by 83 percent within 5 to 10 years. Researchers wrote:

“These results suggest that metabolic biomarker profiling could potentially be used to guide patient care, if further validated in relevant clinical settings.”

With this new blood test, scientists are now hoping that it can be useful for clinicians to come up with a much better plan to tackle their patients’ medication condition.

The test measures how physically vulnerable you are.

First author Dr. Joris Deleen said that while the new blood test may not be able to predict how much years you have left, but it can tell you how physically vulnerable you are, which should compel you to do something about your health and lifestyle.

Though the new blood test is promising, scientists say it’s not ready for use in the clinical setting and more research is needed. The study also involved only patients of European descent and have not looked into other ethnic groups.