2024 · Nature biomedical engineering · open access
Multi-omics microsampling for the profiling of lifestyle-associated changes in health
Shen et al.
The finding, in our words
The study demonstrates that frequent collection of 10 microlitres of capillary blood, combined with wearable sensor data, enables simultaneous measurement of thousands of metabolites, lipids, cytokines and proteins, revealing individualised metabolic and inflammatory responses to dietary interventions and molecular fluctuations linked to intra-day changes in heart rate, glucose, cortisol and physical activity, supporting dynamic health profiling outside the clinic.
A paraphrase to the Library’s standard, never the abstract. The source is one link away and is always the authority.
Microsampling enables less invasive, patient-centric self-collection of capillary blood for remote monitoring of metabolites and lipids, overcoming conventional venipuncture constraints. Recent device innovations address dried blood spot limitations, particularly haematocrit and volume variations, expanding decentralised applications in population health, drug discovery and multi-omics research.
In progressive multiple sclerosis, higher serum neurofilament light chain levels were associated with reduced daily step counts from wearables, while higher step counts were linked to lower sNfL. A ten percent increase in steps corresponded to a 0.015 decrease in sNfL z-score, suggesting rising sNfL may predict subsequent mobility decline.
A US survey of 3,400 adults aged 62 to 90 collected up to 15 biomeasures at home, including saliva, dried blood spots and urine, with Salivette and Oragene among the devices used, which shows that several patient-centric sampling methods can run together in home-based research.
This review establishes that microsampling across blood, saliva, urine and stool matrices offers validated workflows and regulatory recognition for human biomonitoring comparable to conventional methods. It finds that these decentralised approaches enhance participant acceptability and enable screening in remote or low-resource settings.
In adults with type 1 diabetes, Dexcom G7 and FreeStyle Libre 3 showed high accuracy during physical activity, whereas the Simplera system was less accurate; this matters for selecting devices in decentralised monitoring.