HOUGHTON — Instead of using blood to test vitamin levels in our bodies, Michigan Tech researchers are exploring tears as a less invasive alternative.

But how would researchers know if they had a subject that wasn’t missing key nutrients?

Babies were the answer, with their nutrient rich diets of breast milk or fortified formulas.

With to funding from the Gerber Foundation and local parent participation through collaboration with Colleen Vallad-Hix of UP Health System, Tech researchers found the method has potential.

“There were two different research questions that were asked, one was basically, can we discern vitamins from tears and if so, does that correlate with the levels that are present in the blood,” said Adrienne Minerick, dean of research and innovation in the College of Engineering.

After testing blood and tears from 15 parent-child pairs, a correlation was found. Both between vitamin levels in blood and between parent and child.

“Of the 13 essential vitamins, eight of them we were able to reliably find correlation with blood from the samples that we took,” Minerick said.

These vitamins come from food and cannot be produced by the body making them a reliable method of determining nutrient deficiency.

She noted that when using tears, water soluble vitamins are easiest to detect as they are most common in tears though fat-soluble vitamins were still present.

“It depends on the vitamins and that’s part of the challenge,” said Minerick. “Some vitamins are fairly abundant and easy for us to detect. For those, the correlation is very strong. When it becomes elevated in blood, it becomes elevated in tears, and it’s very good.”

The team is seeking funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to continue research and improve the method. The metabolized vitamins are another area of potential development.

“Some of the vitamins…when our bodies gets ahold of them, it metabolizes them to a different chemical structure, so we can go looking for the metabolized (vitamins),” Minerick said.

If Minerick and her team can make this method more successful, nutrient level analysis would be faster and simpler.

As part of the research, the team also investigated the correlation between parent nutrition and infant nutrition. Conducting a longitudinal study with local participants and a nutritionist.

In this study researchers followed them through the first year covering the transition from liquid to solid foods. This is where nutrient deficiency concerns began to come up.

“They’re learning their habits from their parents,” she said. “If we’ve got these parents that 60 percent of them are at risk for nutritional deficiency, does that translate to the infants and children having that?

“As a scientist…I’d love to have direct evidence that what I’m doing is putting my kids in good health and that they’re well set up for all the rest of it (life).”