Predictive serum biomarkers of patients with cerebral infarction

ABSTRACT

Objectives

Stroke is the third most common cause of death and also causes seizures and disability. Biomarkers are abnormal signal indicators at the biological level that are present before the organism is seriously affected and are more sensitive to early diagnosis than are traditional imaging methods. Early diagnosis of stroke can prevent the progression of the disease. However, there are currently no widely accepted biomarkers for stroke that have been applied clinically.

Methods

A serum metabonomics method based on ultra-high-performance liquid chromatography-quadrupole-time of flight tandem mass spectrometry (UPLC-Q-TOF/MS) was used to identify potential biomarkers and metabolic pathways of cerebral infarction. The receiver-operating characteristic (ROC) curve was used to verify the diagnostic and classification abilities of the biomarkers, and a support vector machine (SVM) model was developed for the prediction of cerebral infarction.

Results

Principal component analysis revealed a clear separation between the normal and cerebral infarction groups. A total of 13 potential serum biomarkers were identified, which were mainly involved in linoleic acid metabolism; phenylalanine, tyrosine, and tryptophan biosynthesis; tyrosine metabolism; arachidonic acid metabolism; and fatty acid biosynthesis. The ROC curve analysis showed that the potential biomarkers had high specificity and sensitivity for the diagnosis of cerebral infarction. The SVM model had good diagnostic ability and could accurately distinguish the control group from the cerebral infarction group.

Discussion

The metabonomics approach may be a useful bioanalytical method for understanding the pathophysiology of cerebral infarction and may provide an experimental basis for the development of clinical biomarkers for stroke.

KEYWORDS:

• Cerebral infarction
• UPLC-Q-TOF/MS
• metabonomics
• biomarkers

Disclosure statement

The authors declare that they have no conflicts of interest.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here

Additional information

Funding

This study was supported by the Guangxi Emergency and Medical Rescue Personnel Small Highland Open Project (grant no. GXJZ201622) and the Guangxi First-class Discipline Project for Pharmaceutical Sciences (grant no. GXFCDPPS-2018);Guangxi First-class Discipline Project for Pharmaceutical Sciences[GXFCDPPS-2018];Guangxi emergency and medical rescue personnel small highland open project[GXJZ201622];