Metabolomic strategies to study lipotoxicity in cardiovascular disease

Cardiovascular disease arises from a combination of dyslipidaemia and systemic inflammation in both humans and mouse models of the disease. Given the strong metabolic component and also the strong interaction between diet and disease, one would expect strategies based on the global profiling of metabolism should hold substantial promise in defining the mechanism involved in this collection of pathologies. This review examines how metabolomics is being used both as a research tool to understand mechanisms of pathology and as an approach for biomarker discovery in cardiovascular disease. While the lipid fraction of blood plasma has a profound influence on the development of cardiovascular disease, there is also a growing body of evidence that the aqueous fraction of metabolites also have a role in following the effects of myocardial infarction and monitoring the development of atherosclerosis. Metabolomics has also been used in conjunction with proteomics and transcriptomics as part of a systems biology description of cardiovascular disease and in high-throughput approaches to profile large numbers of patients as part of epidemiology studies to understand how the genome interacts with the development of atherosclerosis.