Nails can point the finger at diabetes

Fingernails can be used as an easily obtained and inexpensive diagnostic marker for diabetes, according to information presented at the 2015 American Association for Clinical Chemistry (AACC) Annual Meeting & Clinical Lab Expo in Atlanta.

This, as well as a test for gestational diabetes, may lead to easier, timelier, and more affordable ways of identifying and treating diabetes, according to a study from the AACC.

Fingernails Can ID Diabetes

A team of researchers in the Department of Clinical Chemistry, Microbiology, and Immunology at Ghent University, in Ghent, Belgium, investigated whether fingernail clippings could be used instead of a blood sample to diagnose and monitor diabetes.

The researchers collected nail clippings from 25 people with diabetes and 25 people without the disease. After grinding the clippings into powder, the researchers used a relatively inexpensive spectrometer to measure glycation in the nail proteins.

“We found a striking difference in the measurements between the control group and the patients with diabetes,” said lead investigator Joris R. Delanghe, MD, PhD. “This finding suggests that nail clippings may serve as a reliable and non-invasive diagnostic tool.”

This discovery has the potential to make diagnosing diabetes much simpler and less expensive, Dr. Delanghe explained. Nail clippings, unlike blood samples, can be obtained non-invasively. They also take up little space and can be stored at room temperature for at least 1 month without affecting spectrometer outcomes.

These factors may make this proposed test particularly useful in low- and middle-income countries, where laboratories are often located long distances from where patients live, Dr. Delanghe said.

Quick Test for Gestational Diabetes

The HbA1c test measures a patient’s average glucose blood levels over a period of 3 months, so it's not useful to determine a patient’s blood glucose values on a daily, or even on a weekly, basis. This makes it challenging to closely track glucose levels during the relatively few weeks of pregnancy, especially given that gestational diabetes is not diagnosed until the third trimester.

So, a team of researchers led by Sridevi Devaraj, PhD, director of clinical chemistry at Texas Children’s Hospital and a professor at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, TX, set out to compare a handful of glycemic biomarkers in order to find a new blood test for gestational diabetes.

Using stored blood samples collected from 124 pregnant women, Dr. Devaraj and her colleagues measured the levels of three separate types of proteins. They found that the levels of one of the proteins—1,5-Anhydroglucitol (1,5-AG)—were significantly different between the women who had been diagnosed with gestational diabetes and those who had not. The researchers were also able to establish a specific cut-off level at which the concentration of 1,5-AG became a reliable predictor of which women had diabetes.

One of the potential advantages of 1,5-AG as a biomarker for gestational diabetes is its short half-life: 2 weeks compared with HbA1c’s 3 months. “Our findings are very preliminary and need to be confirmed in larger groups of women,” Dr. Devaraj said. “But, if confirmed, they suggest a possible new and more immediate approach for diagnosing and monitoring diabetes during pregnancy.”