Houston Research Team On Verge of Painless Lupus Testing

Style Magazine Newswire | 4/6/2018, 2:07 p.m.
An estimated 1.5 million people in the U.S. have lupus. Determining if someone has the autoimmune disorder can be done …

KPRC

An estimated 1.5 million people in the U.S. have lupus. Determining if someone has the autoimmune disorder can be done with a blood test, and often a biopsy of the patient’s kidney is necessary, which is invasive and painful. A University of Houston research team is on the cusp of replacing those tests with something much easier, a saliva test. UH graduate student, Sanam Soomro is working with Professor Chandra Mohan to determine if proteins in our saliva could reveal an illness like lupus. In a study funded by the National Institutes of Health, Mohan is looking to prove whether there are biomarkers in saliva that can diagnose lupus, or complications of the disease, and possibly eliminate other more invasive tests. If the research is successful in determining those biomarkers, they can figure out if this test is more accurate than what’s currently available.

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