Objectives: We sought to identify metabolic pathways characterizing human heart failure (HF) using ¹NMR based urinary metabolomic analysis in conjunction with multivariate statistics.
Design and methods: Patients with systolic HF of ischemic origin (n=15) and healthy controls (n=20) participated in this study. Patients with type 2 diabetes mellitus were excluded.
Results: The results showed that the urine of the HF patients had higher levels of metabolites for acetate (p<0.05) and acetone (p<0.01) compared to the healthy controls. In addition, there was a perturbation in methylmalonate metabolism as shown by increased urinary levels of methylmalonic acid (p<0.001) in the HF patients. HF patients also had increased urinary levels of cytosine (p<0.01) and phenylacetylglycine (p<0.01) and decreased 1-methylnicotinamide (p<0.05) compared to healthy controls.
Conclusions: TCA cycle metabolites and fatty acid metabolism were modified in the HF patients, indicating altered energy metabolism. Moreover, perturbations of metabolism in nucleotide and methylmalonate were observed.
Copyright © 2010 The Canadian Society of Clinical Chemists. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.