Blood Biomarker Ratio Predicts Five-Year Asthma Flare Risk With About 90% Accuracy

Peer-reviewed findings indicate a metabolite ratio outperforms routine risk factors in forecasting severe asthma attacks.

Overview

Nature Communications published the study from Mass General Brigham/Harvard and Karolinska identifying a sphingolipid-to-steroid blood ratio as a long-range predictor of serious exacerbations.
Researchers analyzed more than 2,500 participants from three Mass General Brigham cohorts using targeted mass spectrometry–based metabolomics.
The model achieved roughly 90% accuracy for five-year risk and reproduced performance at about 89% in an independent validation group.
Standard clinical measures such as prior flare history, lung function, or blood eosinophils reached only about 50–70% accuracy by comparison.
Authors call for broader external validation, prospective trials, and cost-effectiveness studies before clinical use; in some analyses the model separated high- and low-risk groups by nearly a year to first exacerbation.