Potential metabolite markers of schizophrenia

• Published in: Molecular psychiatry Vol. 18; no. 1; pp. 67 - 78
• Main Authors: Yang, J, Chen, T, Sun, L, Zhao, Z, Qi, X, Zhou, K, Cao, Y, Wang, X, Qiu, Y, Su, M, Zhao, A, Wang, P, Yang, P, Wu, J, Feng, G, He, L, Jia, W, Wan, C
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: London Nature Publishing Group UK 01.01.2013; Nature Publishing Group
• Subjects: 3-Hydroxybutyric Acid - blood; 631/45/320; 692/53; 692/699/476/1799; 692/700/139; Adult; Adult and adolescent clinical studies; Area Under Curve; Behavioral Sciences; Biological and medical sciences; Biological markers; Biological Psychology; Biomarkers; Brain; Brain research; Care and treatment; Cystine - blood; Diagnosis; Disease; Education; Fatty acids; Fatty Acids, Monounsaturated - blood; Female; Gas Chromatography-Mass Spectrometry; Genomes; Glucose; Glyceric Acids - blood; Health aspects; Humans; Hypotheses; Identification and classification; Ketone bodies; Laboratories; Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy; Male; Medical sciences; Medicine; Medicine & Public Health; Mental disorders; Metabolism; Metabolites; Metabolome; Middle Aged; Neurosciences; NMR; Nuclear magnetic resonance; Original; original-article; Pharmacotherapy; Physiological aspects; Proteomics; Psychiatry; Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry; Psychopathology. Psychiatry; Psychoses; Pyruvic acid; Pyruvic Acid - blood; ROC Curve; Schizophrenia; Schizophrenia - blood; Schizophrenia - diagnosis; Tomography; Urine; China; United States > US; Nashville Tennessee; metaobonomics; NMR; GC-TOFMS; schizophrenia; biomarker; Psychosis; Metabolite; Biological marker; Schizophrenia
• ISSN: 1359-4184; 1476-5578; 1476-5578
• DOI: 10.1038/mp.2011.131

Schizophrenia is a severe mental disorder that affects 0.5–1% of the population worldwide. Current diagnostic methods are based on psychiatric interviews, which are subjective in nature. The lack of disease biomarkers to support objective laboratory tests has been a long-standing bottleneck in the clinical diagnosis and evaluation of schizophrenia. Here we report a global metabolic profiling study involving 112 schizophrenic patients and 110 healthy subjects, who were divided into a training set and a test set, designed to identify metabolite markers. A panel of serum markers consisting of glycerate, eicosenoic acid, β-hydroxybutyrate, pyruvate and cystine was identified as an effective diagnostic tool, achieving an area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) of 0.945 in the training samples (62 patients and 62 controls) and 0.895 in the test samples (50 patients and 48 controls). Furthermore, a composite panel by the addition of urine β-hydroxybutyrate to the serum panel achieved a more satisfactory accuracy, which reached an AUC of 1 in both the training set and the test set. Multiple fatty acids and ketone bodies were found significantly ( P <0.01) elevated in both the serum and urine of patients, suggesting an upregulated fatty acid catabolism, presumably resulting from an insufficiency of glucose supply in the brains of schizophrenia patients.