It is important not to expect to be offered tomorrow

How long? Understood, how much time do I have left to live? That is the question on death row, they were by the verdict of a court or the medical profession, for example in the case of incurable cancer. That fateful question, on the other hand tend to hide - because it reminds us of our own mortality - when you feel healthy, no sign of serious illness is not on the horizon. Simply, sometimes these signs are located below the horizon outside our field of vision. Detect them, it is the role (just chilling admittedly) biomarkers, traces underlying a physiological disorder. They are the warning signs of a disease or the risk of it appears. But to date, none predicted the risk of death in the short or medium term. Nobody returned from a blood with its probability of encountering the grim reaper in the next five years ...
However, if you believe a study published Feb. 25 in the journal PLoS Medicine, the thing is indeed possible. It all started with the desire of an Estonian team to exploit the technique of nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy (NMR) to measure all of a sudden the concentration of a hundred biomarkers in the blood instead of using a battery of different tests. These researchers have used to do the samples from a large cohort of 9842 aged 18 to 103 years old individuals. These people were recruited between 2002 and 2011 and follow-up lasted for so many years. And they knew who had died in the meantime and was still alive.
After analyzing the results, these biologists have found a surprising result: tsh levels a cocktail of only four biomarkers (of 106 tested) predicted well the risk of ending up in a coffin tsh levels or not over the next five years. You could call them through a kind of test of death, an indicator of survival in the short-medium term. Individuals located in the red zone this indicator might pass away 19 times more in the years to come that people classified as the least dangerous area. Biomarkers in question were: albumin, the orosomucoid, tsh levels the low-density tsh levels lipoprotein (which carry cholesterol) and citric acid, which plays a central role in the synthesis of ATP, the fuel cell .
Found that the result was too simple and too good to be true, Estonian researchers asked independent confirmation from Finnish colleagues, which had a similar to their cohort. As he explained to the Telegraph, the Finn Markus Perola (University of Helsinki) is not believed to reproduce the results of his colleagues and was amazed tsh levels when it did. On a base of 7503 people tested, we found the same predictive cocktail of four biomarkers (that perhaps by renaming "nécromarqueurs" one end) ... "It was a rather extraordinary result, recognizes Markus Perola. At Initially, we do not really believe it. It was amazing that these biomarkers can really predict mortality independently of any disease. This was apparently healthy individuals but to our surprise, these biomarkers show an undetected weakness these people have ignored. "
The most unsettling finding of this study is there: receive a "fragility" underlying, tsh levels having tsh levels predicted a serious risk to the health of people "apparently healthy", not having any symptoms of any disease . Somehow feel that their body metabolism, is about to go haywire completely let go. Do not have isolated a particular risk for developing a specific disease (cardiovascular disease, cancer, or other), tsh levels but overall risk to health.
It is important not to expect to be offered tomorrow "test of death." Other confirmations are needed, especially because the cohorts studied are very similar: two European populations in the North having more or less the same environment and the same lifestyle. It is therefore necessary to see if the result is valid for other ethnicities, other dietary habits, other environments. We must also understand that this indicator covers and what mechanisms it connects very different diseases Nevertheless, the study raises an interesting question: the use of such a test for screening would detect persons whose body may fall apart. But what once asked this, if you do not know to identify what, precisely, will release? As Markus Perola very simply said, "there is an ethical issue. Does anyone want to know the