New method predicts asthma attacks five years in advance

Scientists from Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Massachusetts General Hospital, together with the Karolinska Institutet, have proposed a new way to predict asthma exacerbations. The results of the work were published in the journal Nature Communications.

The study examined data from more than 2,500 asthma patients from three large cohorts, collected over many years from electronic health records. Using metabolomics, the researchers analyzed the composition of small molecules in the blood and identified a close relationship between disease control and the balance of two groups of metabolites – sphingolipids and steroids.

It turned out that it is their ratio that allows us to assess the risk of asthma exacerbations over the next five years. In some cases, the developed model differed the time of onset of the first exacerbation in patients with high and low risk by almost a year. At the same time, individual indicators of metabolites were less informative than their ratio, which turned out to be the most reliable prognostic marker.

The authors believe that the findings open up new opportunities for a personalized approach to asthma treatment. An assay based on this biochemical balance could potentially be introduced into routine laboratories and help clinicians identify patients who, despite apparently stable disease, still have hidden metabolic abnormalities.

At the same time, the researchers note that additional confirmation is needed before introducing the method into clinical practice. We are talking about conducting direct clinical trials and assessing the economic feasibility of such a test.