AUTHOR=Xu Yali , Zhao Bin , Xu Zhu , Li Xiaogang , Sun Qiang 

TITLE=Plasma metabolomic signatures of breast cancer

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Medicine

VOLUME=10

YEAR=2023

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/medicine/articles/10.3389/fmed.2023.1148542

DOI=10.3389/fmed.2023.1148542

ISSN=2296-858X

ABSTRACT=<sec id="sec1"><title>Background</title><p>Breast cancer is a common malignant tumor. A large number of medical evidence shows that breast cancer screening can improve the early diagnosis rate and reduce the mortality rate of breast cancer. In the present study, a wide range of targeted metabolomics profiling was conducted to investigate the plasma signatures of breast cancer.</p></sec><sec id="sec2"><title>Methods</title><p>A total of 86 patients with benign breast abnormalities (L group) and 143 patients with breast cancer (E group) were recruited. We collected their plasma samples and clinical information. Metabolomic analysis, based on the coverage of a wide range of targeted metabolomics was conducted with ultraperformance liquid chromatography- triple quadrupole-linear ion trap mass spectrometer (UPLC-QTRAP-MS).</p></sec><sec id="sec3"><title>Results</title><p>We identified 716 metabolites through widely-targeted metabolomics. Serotonergic synapse was the main different metabolic pathway. The fold change of 14 metabolites was considered significantly different (fold change &lt;0.67 or fold change &gt;2; <italic>p</italic> &lt; 0.05). By combining all the 14 metabolites, we achieved differentiation of L group vs. E group (AUC = 0.792, 95%Cl: 0.662–0.809).</p></sec><sec id="sec4"><title>Conclusion</title><p>This study provided new insights into plasma biomarkers for differential diagnosis of benign abnormalities and breast cancer.</p></sec>