Will you be alive in 5 years? Use ‘Death Test’ to find out!

You can now find out whether you’ll be alive in the next five years or not, thanks to a new blood sample-based technology that identifies those at higher risks of dying through diseases ranging from heart illness to cancer.

A Mail Online research shows how scientists have come up with a ‘death test’ that can predict your death probability depending on your DNA. 

The test, created by Finnish and Estonian creators, will hopefully help people locate their hidden diseases and give them enough time to get medically treated. 

Researcher Johannes Kettunen, along with others, took blood samples from more than 17,000 generally healthy people for more than 100 different chemicals.

After tracking the volunteers for several years, they compared the blood samples of those who died with those who survived.

This revealed four chemical signals, or biomarkers, that forecast a high risk of dying from any disease within five years.

“Though all four compounds are normally found in blood, it is their levels that are important,” the journal PLoS Medicine reports.

Factors like smoking, obesity, drinking, age, blood pressure and cholesterol were also taken into account.

Kettunen, a scientist at the Institute for Molecular Medicine in Finland, said: “What is especially interesting is that these biomarkers reflect the risk for dying from very different types of diseases such as heart disease or cancer. They seem to be signs of a general frailty in the body.”

“Next we aim to study whether some kind of connecting factor between these biomarkers can be identified. We believe that in the future these measures can be used to identify people who appear healthy but in fact have serious underlying illnesses and guide them to proper treatment,” he added.

However, he said that a lot of research work lay ahead before they could put out the test for public use.

Moreover, there also remains an underlying fear of insurance companies and pension firms misusing this information to alter their policies and payouts for personal benefits.