ALS is a disease you usually meet after it has already started. A blood panel published today changes the order of that.
Researchers at the University of Miami screened more than 5,000 proteins, narrowed them to 92 candidates, and finished with 19. That panel predicts when a person's ALS symptoms will begin, to within an average error of about 18 months [1].
The cohort underneath it is the part that is hard to build and impossible to rush. One hundred and thirty-seven participants in the Pre-fALS study, followed for nearly twenty years, with the result validated against the UK Biobank [1].
Michael Benatar and Joanne Wuu led the work, funded by the NIH, and it is published in Nature Medicine [1].
Being precise about what this is: it is prognostic, not therapeutic. It does not slow the disease or treat it. What it does is tell you who is close to onset - which is exactly the problem that has made prevention trials nearly impossible to run, because you cannot test a preventive drug without knowing who to give it to and when.
Twenty years of one cohort, and the answer is a number of months.
