Do you suffer from blood diseases?

No one is immune from disease. However, you must admit that if you knew in advance that, say, in 5 years you would have this or that disease, you would do everything possible to prevent it. In recent research, scientists have found a way to identify a person's predisposition to leukemia.

According to experts, a person's risk of developing leukemia is signaled by certain changes in his blood.

In two studies, scientists have found that mutations specific to blood cancer can be easily diagnosed.

Such changes appear more often with age, i.e. at birth, they may not be noticed, but the older a person gets, the easier it is to detect the warning signs of the disease.

DNA tests have shown that carriers of certain mutations are among the patients who can develop leukemia or lymphoma within five years.

It is noteworthy that such a discovery was made at once by two groups of researchers who worked separately.

Most of the previous research into blood cancers has focused on studying cancer DNA to identify mutating genes. New research has focused on somatic mutations, i.e. mutations that occur in cells only over time – as they multiply in the body.

Professor Stephen McCarroll of Harvard Medical Institute stated that "…most diseases develop gradually– over many months or years. The results of the study allowed us to look into the early stages of the development of blood cancer."

Siddhartha Jacewell of Massachusetts General Hospital, who is the lead author of the second study, added: "Blood cancer is already the final stage of the process. By the time the cancer becomes diagnosed, it has acquired several kinds of mutations that have evolved over the course of We are trying to determine the stage of the disease at which there is no malignant tumor yet, the stage at which only one initial mutation occurs in the cells.

Two teams of scientists came to the same conclusion in different ways.

In the first study, scientists found mutations that are a sign of an increased risk of cancer, as well as other diseases (type II diabetes, heart disease, stroke).

The authors of the second study initially tried to determine whether mutations increase the risk of developing schizophrenia. However, they found that the mutations were "concentrated" in a few genes: cancer genes. They then found a link between the mutations and an increased risk of blood cancer.

The scientists said that their future research will focus on finding ways to prevent blood cancer. They also added: "The presence of such mutated cells could serve as a biomarker, similar to LDL cholesterol for cardiovascular disease, to test the effectiveness of potential preventive treatments in clinical trials."