The Harvard Medical School researchers’ study at Massachusetts General Hospital shows how the Complete Blood Count (CBC) test can be personalized to improve patient care. Red blood cells, white blood cells, and platelets are just a few of the blood components that are measured by the commonly used CBC test, which offers vital information about a patient’s general health.

According to the study published in Nature, by utilizing machine learning and massive health data, individualized algorithms might evaluate CBC results in light of a patient’s medical history and demographics, providing improved diagnostic and prognostic skills. Particularly for illnesses where early changes in blood counts serve as crucial markers, personalizing the CBC test may result in quicker interventions and more focused therapies.

According to the researchers’ retrospective examination of over 12,000 persons who underwent several CBC tests over a 20-year period, these reference ranges are not at all broadly generalizable.

According to the study, each patient’s collection of nine CBC set points, which include haemoglobin levels, platelet counts, red and white blood cell counts, and cell sizes, can be identified like a fingerprint from those of 98 percent of other healthy persons.

Individual variability resulting from age, sex, ethnicity, and underlying medical conditions may not be taken into consideration when interpreting traditional CBC test results because they are compared to standardized reference ranges. Personalising these reference ranges may result in more accurate evaluations and allow anomalies to be discovered early. Clinicians might diagnose diseases including anemia, infections, coagulation disorders, diabetes, heart disease, and kidney failure and even some types of cancer more precisely if they customized test parameters to take into account the unique characteristics of each patient.

As a result, the researchers concluded that comparing a patient’s fresh CBC findings to their own historical results would give a more accurate picture of their health than comparing their statistics to an outside standard norm.

This strategy, which emphasizes tailored care, is in line with the expanding precision medicine movement. The CBC test may evolve from a generic diagnostic tool to a vital component of individualized treatment with additional study and application.