New research has been published ahead-of-print by The Journal of Nuclear Medicine (JNM). JNM is published by the Society of Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging, an international scientific and medical organization dedicated to advancing nuclear medicine, molecular imaging, and theranostics—precision medicine that allows diagnosis and treatment to be tailored to individual patients in order to achieve the best possible outcomes.

A USC-led team has developed an innovative way to predict blood pressure outcomes after bariatric surgery that outperforms the current standard practice. In 108 adolescents who underwent bariatric surgery, the researchers used blood tests taken before the procedure to predict which patients would have improved blood pressure five years later. The study is one of the first to use cutting-edge “omics” techniques, which analyze the body’s small molecules and proteins, to predict long-term health outcomes. Using a combination of metabolomics and proteomics, which analyze thousands of small molecules and proteins in the body to give a snapshot of cellular function, researchers identified the top 10 molecules linked to improved blood pressure five years after surgery. These 10 molecules gave better predictions of which patients would improve than the current predictive approach, which uses a combination of demographic factors and clinical tests. Five of the 10 molecules were also linked to blood pressure in another group of youth with above average BMI, suggesting the findings may be broadly applicable. The results were just published in the journal Hypertension.