Metabolomic study for essential hypertension patients based on dried blood spot mass spectrometry approach

Hypertension is an increasingly serious public-health challenge worldwide. The traditional blood pressure measurement method could easily and reliably detect blood pressure. However, the delayed symptom onset may influence the screening of essential hypertension (EH). In addition, EH is significantly associated to cardiovascular disease, stroke and kidney disease. Hence, it is urgent to define associated biomarkers with early diagnosis potential for EH. A dried blood spot method integrated with direct infusion mass spectrometry (MS) metabolomic analysis was applied for the detection of metabolites toward 87 EH patients and 91 healthy controls (HC). Multiple algorithms were run on training set (62 EH and 64 HC) for selecting differential metabolites as potential biomarkers. A test set (25 EH and 27 HC) was used to verify and evaluate selected potential biomarkers. A novel blood biomarker model based on Gly, Orn, C10, Orn/Cit, Phe/Tyr, and C5-OH/C8 exhibited potential to differentiate EH patients from HC individuals, with a sensitivity of 0.8400 and a specificity of 0.8889 in test set. The metabolomic analysis of EH is beneficial to the definition of disease-associated biomarkers and the development of new diagnostic approaches. © 2018 IUBMB Life, 70(8):777-785, 2018.