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Believe it or not, a team of researchers developed a blood test that could predict longevity and the risk of dying from cancer, heart disease and diabetes.

Published in the journal Aging Cell, the study highlights how the researchers developed the blood test. They used a biomarker data collected from 5,000 blood samples and analyzed it based on the health developments of the donor over the past eight years.

They compared the biomarker data on the volunteer's health and the conditions they developed over the study period. They discovered 26 different markers that indicated a healthy future and a bad one, including those that shows a person's risk of diseases like cancer, type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease.

"These signatures depict differences in how people age, and they show promise in predicting healthy ageing, changes in cognitive and physical function, survival and age-related diseases like heart disease, stroke, type 2 diabetes and cancer," the authors said as reported by Mail Online.

"It sets the stage for a molecular-based definition of aging that leverages information from multiple circulating biomarkers to generate signatures associated with different mortality and morbidity risk," they added.

The breakthrough blood test could help people identify their risk of certain diseases early on. This could mean that they can modify their lifestyle to prevent the progression of the diseases. Moreover, if diseases are detected early, they are treated immediately, giving the patient a good prognosis of the disease. As the famous cliché goes, "prevention is better than cure."

"Many prediction and risk scores already exist for predicting specific diseases like heart disease," Professor Paola Sebastiani, lead author of the study, said as reported by the Sun.

"Here, though, we are taking another step by showing that particular patterns of groups of markers can indicate how well a person is aging and his or her risk for specific age-related syndromes and diseases," she added.