blood test Archives - Amazing Health Advances

Blood Test Finds Knee Osteoarthritis up to Eight Years Before X-rays

The AHA! Team — Thu, 25 Jul 2024 08:13:23 +0000

Duke Health – DURHAM, N.C. – A blood test successfully predicted knee osteoarthritis at least eight years before tell-tale signs of the disease appeared on x-rays, Duke Health researchers report. In a study appearing April 26 in the journal Science Advances, the researchers validated the accuracy of the blood test that identifies key biomarkers of osteoarthritis. They showed that it predicted development of the disease, as well as its progression, which was demonstrated in their earlier work. The research advances the utility of a blood test that would be superior to current diagnostic tools that often don’t identify the disease until it has caused structural damage to the joint. “Currently, you’ve got to have an abnormal x-ray to show clear evidence of knee osteoarthritis, and by the time it shows up on x-ray, your disease has been progressing for some time,” said senior author Virginia Byers Kraus, M.D., Ph.D., a professor in the departments of Medicine, Pathology, and Orthopaedic Surgery at Duke University School of Medicine. “What our blood test demonstrates is that it’s possible to detect this disease much earlier than our current diagnostics permit.” Osteoarthritis (OA) is the most common form of arthritis, afflicting an estimated 35 million adults in the U.S. and causing significant economic and societal impacts. While there are currently no cures, the success of potential new therapies could hinge on identifying the disease early and slowing its progression before it becomes debilitating. Kraus and colleagues have focused on developing molecular biomarkers that can be used for both clinical diagnostic purposes and as a research tool to aid in the development of effective drugs. In previous studies, the blood biomarker test demonstrated 74% accuracy in predicting knee OA progression and 85% accuracy in diagnosing knee OA. The current study further honed the test’s predictive capabilities. Using a large United Kingdom database, the researchers analyzed serum of 200 white women, half diagnosed with OA and the other half without the disease, matched by body mass index and age. They found that a small number of biomarkers in the blood test successfully distinguished the women with knee OA from those without it, catching molecular signals of OA eight years before many of the women were diagnosed with the disease by x-ray. “This is important because it provides more evidence that there are abnormalities in the joint that can be detected by blood biomarkers well before x-rays can detect OA,” Kraus said. “Early-stage osteoarthritis could provide a ‘window of opportunity’ in which to arrest the disease process and restore joint health.” In addition to Kraus, study authors include Shuming Sun, Alexander Reed, Erik J. Soderblom, M Arthur Moseley, Kaile Zhou, Vaibhav Jain, Nigel Arden, and Yi-Ju Li. The study received funding support from National Institutes of Health (R01-AR071450 and P30-AG028716). To read the original article click here.

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Researchers Identify Biomarker for Depression, Antidepressant Response

AHA Publisher — Wed, 05 Jan 2022 08:00:45 +0000

University of Illinois Chicago via Newswise – Researchers are one step closer to developing a blood test that provides a simple biochemical hallmark for depression and reveals the efficacy of drug therapy in individual patients. Published in a new proof of concept study, researchers led by Mark Rasenick, University of Illinois Chicago distinguished professor of physiology and biophysics and psychiatry, have identified a biomarker in human platelets that tracks the extent of depression. The research builds off of previous studies by several investigators that have shown in humans and animal models that depression is consistent with decreased adenylyl cyclase — a small molecule inside the cell that is made in response to neurotransmitters such as serotonin and epinephrine. “When you are depressed, adenylyl cyclase is low. The reason adenylyl cyclase is attenuated is that the intermediary protein that allows the neurotransmitter to make the adenylyl cyclase, Gs alpha, is stuck in a cholesterol-rich matrix of the membrane — a lipid raft – where they don’t work very well,” Rasenick said. The new study, “A Novel Peripheral Biomarker for Depression and Antidepressant Response,” published in Molecular Psychiatry, has identified the cellular biomarker for translocation of Gs alpha from lipid rafts. The biomarker can be identified through a blood test. “What we have developed is a test that can not only indicate the presence of depression but it can also indicate therapeutic response with a single biomarker, and that is something that has not existed to date,” said Rasenick, who is also a research career scientist at Jesse Brown VA Medical Center. The researchers hypothesize they will be able to use this blood test to determine if antidepressant therapies are working, perhaps as soon as one week after beginning treatment. Previous research has shown that when patients showed improvement in their depression symptoms, the Gs alpha was out of the lipid raft. However, in patients who took antidepressants but showed no improvement in their symptoms, the Gs alpha was still stuck in the raft — meaning simply having antidepressants in the bloodstream was not good enough to improve symptoms. A blood test may be able to show whether or not the Gs alpha was out of the lipid raft after one week. “Because platelets turn over in one week, you would see a change in people who were going to get better. You’d be able to see the biomarker that should presage successful treatment,” Rasenick said. Currently, patients and their physicians have to wait several weeks, sometimes months, to determine if antidepressants are working, and when it is determined they aren’t working, different therapies are tried. “About 30% of people don’t get better — their depression doesn’t resolve. Perhaps, failure begets failure and both doctors and patients make the assumption that nothing is going to work,” Rasenick said. “Most depression is diagnosed in primary care doctor’s offices where they don’t have sophisticated screening. With this test, a doctor could say, ‘Gee, they look like they are depressed, but their blood doesn’t tell us they are. So, maybe we need to re-examine this.’” To read the original article click here.

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Scientists Develop Simple Blood Test for Early Detection of Alzheimer’s Disease

AHA Publisher — Wed, 07 Jul 2021 07:00:20 +0000

Hong Kong University of Science and Technology via EurekAlert – An international research team led by HKUST has developed a simple but robust blood test from Chinese patient data for early detection and screening of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) for the first time, with an accuracy level of over 96%. Currently, doctors mainly rely on cognitive tests to diagnose a person with AD. Besides clinical assessment, brain imaging and lumbar puncture are the two most commonly used medical procedures to detect changes in the brain caused by AD. However, these methods are expensive, invasive, and frequently unavailable in many countries. Now, a team led by Prof. Nancy IP, Vice-President for Research and Development at HKUST, has identified 19 out of the 429 plasma proteins associated with AD to form a biomarker panel representative of an “AD signature” in the blood. Based on this panel, the team has developed a scoring system that distinguishes AD patients from healthy people with more than 96% accuracy. This system can also differentiate among the early, intermediate, and late stages of AD, and can be used to monitor the progression of the disease over time. These exciting findings have led to the development of a high-performance, blood-based test for AD, and may also pave the way to novel therapeutic treatments for the disease. “With the advancement of ultrasensitive blood-based protein detection technology, we have developed a simple, noninvasive, and accurate diagnostic solution for AD, which will greatly facilitate population-scale screening and staging of the disease,” said Prof. Nancy Ip, Morningside Professor of Life Science and the Director of the State Key Laboratory of Molecular Neuroscience at HKUST. The work was conducted in collaboration with researchers at University College London and clinicians in local hospitals including the Prince of Wales Hospital and Queen Elizabeth Hospital. The discovery was made using the proximity extension assay (PEA) – a cutting-edge ultrasensitive and high-throughput protein measurement technology, to examine the levels of over 1,000 proteins in the plasma of AD patients in Hong Kong. As the most comprehensive study of blood proteins in AD patients to date, the work has recently been published in Alzheimer’s & Dementia: The Journal of the Alzheimer’s Association, and has also been featured and actively discussed on different scholarly exchange platforms on AD research such as Alzforum. AD, which affects over 50 million people worldwide, involves the dysfunction and loss of brain cells. Its symptoms include progressive memory loss as well as impaired movement, reasoning, and judgment. While patients often only seek medical attention and are diagnosed when they have memory problems, AD affects the brain at least 10-20 years before symptoms appear. To read the original article click here.

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Breast Cancer Could Soon Be Detected Early Using a Blood Test

AHA Publisher — Fri, 22 Nov 2019 08:00:34 +0000

Dr. Ananya Mandal, MD via News Medical-Net – Researchers have found that breast cancer may be successfully detected up to five years before any symptoms appear using a blood test. The results of this land mark study which could mean diagnosis of breast cancer early and treating it more effectively, were presented at the 2019 NCRI Cancer Conference Sunday (3rd November 2019). The team of researchers have found that the body typically mounts an immune response to the oncoming cancer before the clinical signs are detectable. These immune responses could be determined using the blood test, explain the researchers. Researchers at the University of Nottingham (UK) worked on the proteins that were specifically produced by the cancer cells called tumour-associated antigens (TAAs). They wrote that these antigens were specific for the cancer and led to the activation of the immune system that begins to make antibodies against the cancer. The team developed a panel of tumour-associated antigens which were typically created by the breast cancer cells. Then they looked at the blood samples to see if the body had developed autoantibodies against these TAAs. The team that is part of the Centre of Excellence for Autoimmunity in Cancer (CEAC) group at the School of Medicine, University of Nottingham, included 90 breast cancer patients in their pilot study. They took the blood samples from the patients when they were diagnosed with the cancer and then matched them with a control group of 90 women who did not have breast cancer. Then they used a special screening technology called the protein microarray to rapidly look at the blood samples for presence of autoantibodies against 40 TAAs that they had identified to be associated with breast cancer. The autoantibodies were also compared with 27 TAAs that were not associated with breast cancer to rule out bias or confounders. Ms. Daniyah Alfattani, a PhD student in the group, who presented the study results at the NCRI Conference, said in a statement, “The results of our study showed that breast cancer does induce autoantibodies against panels of specific tumour-associated antigens. We were able to detect cancer with reasonable accuracy by identifying these autoantibodies in the blood.” For this study the team identified and created three panels of TAAs against which they would test the autoantibodies. When they had more number of TAAs in a panel, they found that the accuracy of the test improved. They used a panel of five TAAs and breast cancer could be successfully detected in only 29 percent of the samples from the cancer patients. Using this panel 84 percent could be declared cancer-free among the control group. Another panel had seven TAAs and was successful in breast cancer detection in 35 percent cases and certified 79 percent controls as cancer-free. The third panel with nine TAAs could identify 37 percent of the cancers among the breast cancer patients and declared 79 percent cancer-free among the controls. Ms Alfattani added that this was a pilot test and more needed to be done. She said, “We need to develop and further validate this test. However, these results are encouraging and indicate that it’s possible to detect a signal for early breast cancer. Once we have improved the accuracy of the test, then it opens the possibility of using a simple blood test to improve early detection of the disease.” As a next step the team has now recruited 800 patients with breast cancer and autoantibodies from their samples are being tested against a panel of nine TAAs. Ms Alfattani said, “A blood test for early breast cancer detection would be cost effective, which would be of particular value in low and middle income countries. It would also be an easier screening method to implement compared to current methods, such as mammography.” If this works, the team believes that within next half a decade, the test might be available at clinics for screening women from breast cancer. According to Ms Alfattani, “A blood test capable of detecting any of these cancers at an early stage is the over-riding objective of our work.” Dr Iain Frame, CEO of NCRI, in his statement said, “Early diagnosis using simple, non-invasive ways of detecting the first signs of cancer is a key strategic priority for NCRI and something we’d all like to see working in practice. The results from this pilot study for a blood test to detect early breast cancer are promising and build on this research group’s expertise in other cancers, such as lung cancer. It’s obviously early days but we look forward to seeing the results from the larger group of patients that are now being investigated.” Dr Kotryna Temcinaite, from charity Breast Cancer Now, said, “It’s really promising that a simple blood test could in future help clinicians detect autoantibodies that may arise before breast tumours develop. While these are early findings, it’s exciting that testing for these autoantibodies could potentially help detect breast cancer earlier or identify women who may benefit from being monitored more closely.” Another team is also working on detecting early lung cancer among 12,000 Scottish smokers who are at risk of developing lung cancer because. They are using a test called the ELISA (Early CDT-Lung) looking for autoantibodies and a CT scan of the chest every couple of years to check for onset of cancer. Similar work is also being done with colorectal cancers, liver cancers and pancreatic cancers. The latter is particularly difficult to detect early and when detected usually has a poor prognosis. To read the original article click here.

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Israeli Immune-Response Algorithm Could Aid TB Diagnosis

AHA Publisher — Sun, 06 Oct 2019 07:00:20 +0000

ISRAEL21c Staff via Israel21c – An Israeli algorithm that predicts the immune response to a pathogen could lead to early diagnosis for such diseases as tuberculosis. Just as first impressions set the stage for the entire course of a relationship, first impressions set the stage for how the cells of our immune system react when meeting a new microbe, according to Israeli researchers at the Weizmann Institute of Science. This new insight led the researchers to develop an algorithm that may predict the onset of such diseases as tuberculosis. Their findings were published July 22 in Nature Communications. The phenomenon is explained by lead author Roi Avraham from the Institute’s Biological Regulation Department: “When immune cell and bacterium meet, there can be several outcomes –the immune system can kill the bacteria; the bacteria can overcome the immune defenses; or, in the case of diseases like tuberculosis, the bacterium can lie dormant for years, sometimes causing disease at a later stage and sometimes remaining in hibernation for good. We think that the junction in which one of those paths is chosen takes place some 24 to 48 hours after infection.” Noa Bossel Ben Moshe and Shelly Hen-Avivi in Avraham’s group began by introducing immune cells from blood samples to Salmonella bacteria. Using a method developed in recent years, partially at the Weizmann Institute, they sequenced the gene activity in thousands of immune cells to see what each cell looked like as it responded to the Salmonella and mapped the activation profiles of each. This process revealed patterns not seen in standard lab tests, and it seemed to confirm their hypothesis – there were indeed differences that enabled them to trace responses from the initial meetings to the later outcomes. Hoping to connect their results to real-time blood tests in real patients, the scientists developed an algorithm that would then enable them to extract similar information individual blood cells from standard data sets. “The algorithm we developed,” said Bossel Ben Moshe, “can not only define the ensemble of immune cells that take part in the response, it can reveal their activity levels and thus the potential strength of the immune response.” The first test of the algorithm was in blood samples taken from healthy people in The Netherlands. These samples were infected, in a lab dish, with Salmonella bacteria, and the immune response recorded. Comparisons with existing genomic analysis methods showed that the standard methods did not uncover differences between groups, while the Israeli algorithm revealed significant differences tied to later variations in bacteria-killing abilities. Then they tested whether the same algorithm can be used to diagnose the onset of tuberculosis, which is caused by a bacterium that often chooses the third way – dormancy — and thus can hide out in the body for years. Millions Still Die of TB Every Year Up to a third of the world’s population carries the tuberculosis bacterium, though only a small percentage of these become ill. Still, some two million die of the disease each year, mostly in underdeveloped areas of China, Russia and Africa. The researchers applied their algorithm to blood-test results found in a British database that followed patients and carriers for a period of two years. They found that the activity levels of immune cells called monocytes could be used to predict the onset or course of the disease. “The algorithm is based on the ‘first impressions’ of immune cells and Salmonella, which cause a very different type of illness than mycobacterium tuberculosis,” said Hen-Avivi. “Still, we were able to predict, early on, which of the carriers would develop the active form of the disease.” Once tuberculosis symptoms appear, patients have to take three different antibiotics over the course of nine months, and antibiotic resistance has become rampant in these bacteria. “If those who are at risk of active disease could be identified when the bacterial load is smaller, their chances of recovery will be better,” explained Avraham. The researchers intend to expand their own database on tuberculosis and other pathogens so to as to refine the algorithm and work on developing the tools that may, in the future, be used to predict who will develop full-blown infectious diseases. To read the original article click here. For more articles by Israel21c click here.

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New Blood Test Capable of Detecting Multiple Types of Cancer

AHA Publisher — Sat, 05 Oct 2019 07:00:50 +0000

Dana-Farber Cancer Institute via News Wise – The new test looks for DNA, which cancer cells shed into the bloodstream when they die. In contrast to “liquid biopsies,” which detect genetic mutations or other cancer-related alterations in DNA, the technology focuses on modifications to DNA known as methyl groups. Newswise — A new blood test in development has shown ability to screen for numerous types of cancer with a high degree of accuracy, a trial of the test shows. Dana-Farber Cancer Institute investigators will present the results of the multi-center trial during a session today at the European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO) 2019 Congress. The test, developed by GRAIL, Inc., uses next-generation sequencing technology to probe DNA for tiny chemical tags (methylation) that influence whether genes are active or inactive. When applied to nearly 3,600 blood samples – some from patients with cancer, some from people who had not been diagnosed with cancer at the time of the blood draw – the test successfully picked up a cancer signal from the cancer patient samples, and correctly identified the tissue from where the cancer began (the tissue of origin). The test’s specificity – its ability to return a positive result only when cancer is actually present – was high, as was its ability to pinpoint the organ or tissue of origin, researchers found. The new test looks for DNA, which cancer cells shed into the bloodstream when they die. In contrast to “liquid biopsies,” which detect genetic mutations or other cancer-related alterations in DNA, the technology focuses on modifications to DNA known as methyl groups. Methyl groups are chemical units that can be attached to DNA, in a process called methylation, to control which genes are “on” and which are “off.” Abnormal patterns of methylation turn out to be, in many cases, more indicative of cancer – and cancer type – than mutations are. The new test zeroes in on portions of the genome where abnormal methylation patterns are found in cancer cells. “Our previous work indicated that methylation-based assays outperform traditional DNA-sequencing approaches to detecting multiple forms of cancer in blood samples,” said the study’s lead author, Geoffrey Oxnard, MD, of Dana-Farber. “The results of the new study demonstrate that such assays are a feasible way of screening people for cancer.” In the study, investigators analyzed cell-free DNA (DNA that had once been confined to cells but had entered the bloodstream upon the cells’ death) in 3,583 blood samples, including 1,530 from patients diagnosed with cancer and 2,053 from people without cancer. The patient samples comprised more than 20 types of cancer, including hormone receptor-negative breast, colorectal, esophageal, gallbladder, gastric, head and neck, lung, lymphoid leukemia, multiple myeloma, ovarian, and pancreatic cancer. The overall specificity was 99.4%, meaning only 0.6% of the results incorrectly indicated that cancer was present. The sensitivity of the assay for detecting a pre-specified high mortality cancers (the percent of blood samples from these patients that tested positive for cancer) was 76%. Within this group, the sensitivity was 32% for patients with stage I cancer; 76% for those with stage II; 85% for stage III; and 93% for stage IV. Sensitivity across all cancer types was 55%, with similar increases in detection by stage. For the 97% of samples that returned a tissue of origin result, the test correctly identified the organ or tissue of origin in 89% of cases. Detecting even a modest percent of common cancers early could translate into many patients who may be able to receive more effective treatment if the test were in wide use, Oxnard remarked. To read the original article click here.

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