Personalized clotting profiles can help doctors prescribe more effective treatments for patients facing a heightened heart attack or stroke risk, according to new data published in Blood Advances.
Researchers developed a test that divides patients into different cohorts based on how their bodies react to clotting events. They used donated blood from participants, treating the samples in a laboratory to determine how platelets responded to a variety of stimulants. The team then created new software and algorithms designed to analyze and classify the data.
In the study, cohort one included healthy fasted nonsmoking donors 30 to 65 years of age, free from drugs known to influence platelet function, while cohort two was comprised of donors 18 to 75 years of age who did not fast.
“This research showcases how we can better understand the individual ways that our platelets respond to events that lead to clotting, either when clotting is needed for healing, or when they shouldn’t, which is when strokes and heart attacks happen,” lead author Joanne Dunster, with the Institute for Cardiovascular and Metabolic Research at the University of Reading in the U.K., said in a prepared statement.
The team discovered that there were two significant and independent characteristics that the platelets displayed: “the sensitivity of a response to an agent, and the strength of response.”
Furthermore, the researchers found these to be independent traits that allowed donors to be classified into different groups. The researchers were able to group donors into six distinct groups, groups that mostly remained unchanged after retesting occurred two years later.
“The next big thing in medicine is the idea of personalization of treatments, which requires much more detailed profiles of our bodies,” Jon Gibbins, director of the Institute of Cardiovascular and Metabolic Research, said in the same statement. “Heart disease and strokes are the biggest killers around the world, and millions of patients are prescribed drugs to reduce their risk of having a potentially deadly attack. Currently mostly patients are treated the same–a one size fits all approach. We hope that our new testing will allow us to predict who needs treatment and which drug to use.”
The full analysis can be read here.