Metabolomics approaches for the understanding of psychotic mental disorders

• Autor(a) principal: Lopes, Ana Olga Ventura Gomes Caiola
• Data de Publicação: 2022
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10773/37875
• topic: LC-MS/MS; Metabolomics; Peptidomics; Plasma; Schizophrenia; Bipolar disorder

Mental illnesses such as Schizophrenia (SCZ) and Bipolar Disorder (BD) can cause major disturbances in the cognitive and emotional control of their patients, which has a great impact on their lives. SCZ and BD are diseases that are difficult to diagnose due to the number of symptoms that overlap between them. Through the study of omics, it is possible not only to better understand these diseases, but also to study possible biomarkers, which could be extremely important to define a diagnosis, and consequently, provide a better treatment and prognosis for these patients. The Liquid Chromatography coupled to Mass Spectrometry (LC-MS) approach was used to study the metabolomics and peptidomics of 69 patients and 15 controls. Two comparisons were analyzed: Controls vs Disease and SCZ/Schizophreniform (SCZFM) vs BD/intermediate diagnosis. From the first comparison, it was possible to detect 4 interesting “features”, 7 endogenous metabolites and 11 statistically altered peptides. The interesting features were 452.7/11.8, 497.2/14.9, 516.3/24.5 and 757.4/8.3. The 7 interesting metabolites were Isoleucine/Leucine, N-Acetylalanine, Ornithine, Palmitoylcarnitine, Phenylalanine, Proline and Valine. Of the 11 peptides, there are 3 from the Fibrinogen Alpha Chain, 2 from the Apolipoprotein A-II protein, 2 from the Complement protein C4-B, 1 from the Complement protein C3, 1 from the Fibrinogen Beta Chain, 1 from the Kininogen-1 and 1 of the Selenocysteine- Specific Elongation Factor. In the second comparison, 4 statistically altered “features” were detected, 377.1/15.6, 448.3/21.9, 452.3/24.8 and 564.2/15.9. In addition to the individual molecules, in the first comparison 3 altered pathways were detected, Bile Acid Biosynthesis, Vitamin E Metabolism and Aminoacyl-tRNA Biosynthesis and in the second comparison no altered pathway was detected as altered. Although it was not possible to propose a potential biomarker or altered pathways that confidently distinguish SCZ from BD, we present the metabolic pathways on which future studies should focus on these two diseases for the improvement of the treatment.