THURSDAY, April 3, 2025 (HealthDay News) -- An experimental blood test might be able to help doctors predict whether someone will recover their mobility following a spinal cord injury.
The test looks for fragments of spinal cord DNA floating freely in a person’s blood, researchers recently reported in the Journal of Clinical Investigation.
Higher levels of this DNA is associated with more severe spinal cord injuries that cause paralysis, researchers found.
“If you have a spinal cord injury, your main question is simple: Am I going to walk again?” lead researcher Dr. Tej Azad, neurosurgery chief resident at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, said in a news release.
“With the new blood test, we are trying to bring a precision medicine framework to spinal cord injury with something that tells you about injury severity and can hopefully predict neurological recovery,” he continued.
About 18,000 Americans experience spinal cord injuries each year, researchers said in background notes.
Doctors rely on extensive clinical exams and advanced imaging to diagnose these injuries and estimate patients’ chances of partial or full recovery, but this assessment is time-consuming and costly, researchers said.
To come up with a rapid and minimally invasive way to judge injury severity and a person’s potential for recovery, researchers analyzed DNA and proteins in the blood of 50 people with spinal injuries and 25 people who didn’t have such an injury.
Results indicate that worse injuries prompt the release of more spinal cord DNA into the bloodstream.
Researchers also found that four key blood plasma proteins are elevated in patients with spinal cord injuries.
The team created a Spinal Cord Injury Index based on blood-borne spinal cord DNA combined with the four proteins. They then followed patients for six months to see if the index accurately predicted their chances of recovery.
The index did indeed work, predicting with 77% accuracy which patients would show improvement, researchers report.
“Using blood-based biomarkers for cancer diagnosis and progression has changed the practice of oncology,” co-senior researcher Dr. Nicholas Theodore, director of the Johns Hopkins Neurosurgical Spine Center, said in a news release. “Utilizing similar technology, this test is truly an example of personalized medicine in traumatic injury.”
The blood test can be used to steer spinal cord patients to treatments that will best serve them, and more quickly get patients with the worst injuries into cutting-edge clinical trials, Azad said.
However, further studies are required to confirm the test’s effectiveness, researchers said.
More information
The National Institutes of Health has more on spinal cord injury.
SOURCE: Johns Hopkins University, news release, March 31, 2025