Study reveals blood proteins predict risk of developing many diverse diseases

Researchers predicted the onset of 67 diseases, out-performing current standard models

A study conducted in partnership between University College London (UCL), GSK, Queen Mary University of London, Cambridge University and the Berlin Institute of Health at Charité Universitätsmedizin, Germany, has revealed that proteins in the blood could predict the onset of many diverse diseases.

The findings published in Nature Medicine could offer new prediction possibilities to treat and diagnose a wide range of diseases, including multiple myeloma, non-Hodgkin lymphoma, motor neurone disease, pulmonary fibrosis and dilated cardiomyopathy.

Utilising the UK Biobank Pharma Proteomics Project, researchers used data linked to electronic health records of 3,000 plasma proteins from a randomly selected set of over 40,000 participants.

Using advanced analytical techniques to measure thousands of proteins in a single drop of blood, researchers pinpointed each disease between the five and 20 proteins most important for prediction to predict the onset of 67 diseases, out-performing models based on standard, clinically recorded information.

Spiros Denaxas, professor of biomedical informatics, UCL Institute of Health Informatics, commented: “Identifying individuals at high risk of disease through novel markers is one of the cornerstones of medicine. Current efforts tend to focus on [a] single (or a handful) of diseases at a time due to limited data availability.”

The new findings open up new possibilities to predict the development of a wide range of diseases, including rarer conditions, which are usually timely to diagnose.

Researchers aim to validate the findings in different populations, such as people with and without symptoms, as well as signs of diseases and different ethnic groups.

Denaxas said: “Our study exemplifies how the usage of electronic data collected during clinical care can enable scientists to study hundreds of diseases at the same time and uncover novel predictive signatures.”

In June, researchers from UCL and Great Ormond Street Hospital developed a new blood test that could identify children living with a hereditary heart condition, hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, a rare condition that affects up to 1,000 children in the UK.