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Published on: June 17, 2020
Metabolomics data complemented drug use information in epidemiological databases: pilot study of potential kidney
Frank Klont1, Daan Kremer2, Antonio W Gomes Neto2
1Life Sciences Mass Spectrometry, Department of Inorganic and Analytical Chemistry, University of Geneva, Quai Ernest Ansermet 24, 1211 Geneva, Switzerland.
Objective:
The objective of this study was to investigate whether clinical metabolomics, which is increasingly applied in population-based and epidemiological studies, can be used to provide analytical evidence of exposures, and whether such information can be useful to strengthen and/or complement corresponding clinical database entries, taking drug use as an example.
Study Design And Setting:
Liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry (LC-MS) metabolomics analyses were performed on urine from 100 randomly-selected control subjects (50% females) from the TransplantLines Food and Nutrition Biobank and Cohort Study (NCT identifier 'NCT02811835'), and drugs were identified through spectral library searching and targeted signal extraction.
Results:
In 83 subjects for whom drug use information was available, 22 expected and 26 unexpected prescription-only drugs were identified, while 28 expected prescription-only drugs remained undetected. In addition, 7 prescription-only drugs were found in 17 subjects for whom drug use information was unavailable, and 58 over-the-counter drugs were identified in all 100 subjects.
Conclusion:
Molecular evidence for many drugs could be retrieved from LC-MS metabolomics data, which could be useful to complement and strengthen epidemiological databases given that considerable discrepancies were found between analytically-identified drugs and drugs listed in the available clinical database.
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