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Updated: Oct 23, 2025
Author Spotlight: Emerging Technologies and Advanced Tools for Decoding Metabolomics Data Analysis
Published on: November 10, 2023
Associations of network-derived metabolite clusters with prevalent type 2 diabetes among adults of Puerto Rican
Danielle E Haslam1,2, Liming Liang3,4, Dong D Wang5,2
1Channing Division of Network Medicine, Brigham and Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts, USA nhdah@channing.harvard.edu.
Introduction:
We investigated whether network analysis revealed clusters of coregulated metabolites associated with prevalent type 2 diabetes (T2D) among Puerto Rican adults.
Research Design And Methods:
We used liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry to measure fasting plasma metabolites (>600) among participants aged 40-75 years in the Boston Puerto Rican Health Study (BPRHS; discovery) and San Juan Overweight Adult Longitudinal Study (SOALS; replication), with (n=357; n=77) and without (n=322; n=934) T2D, respectively. Among BPRHS participants, we used unsupervised partial correlation network-based methods to identify and calculate metabolite cluster scores. Logistic regression was used to assess cross-sectional associations between metabolite clusters and prevalent T2D at the baseline blood draw in the BPRHS, and significant associations were replicated in SOALS. Inverse-variance weighted random-effect meta-analysis was used to combine cohort-specific estimates.
Results:
Six metabolite clusters were significantly associated with prevalent T2D in the BPRHS and replicated in SOALS (false discovery rate (FDR) <0.05). In a meta-analysis of the two cohorts, the OR and 95% CI (per 1 SD increase in cluster score) for prevalent T2D were as follows for clusters characterized primarily by glucose transport (0.21 (0.16 to 0.30); FDR <0.0001), sphingolipids (0.40 (0.29 to 0.53); FDR <0.0001), acyl cholines (0.35 (0.22 to 0.56); FDR <0.0001), sugar metabolism (2.28 (1.68 to 3.09); FDR <0.0001), branched-chain and aromatic amino acids (2.22 (1.60 to 3.08); FDR <0.0001), and fatty acid biosynthesis (1.54 (1.29 to 1.85); FDR <0.0001). Three additional clusters characterized by amino acid metabolism, cell membrane components, and aromatic amino acid metabolism displayed significant associations with prevalent T2D in the BPRHS, but these associations were not replicated in SOALS.
Conclusions:
Among Puerto Rican adults, we identified several known and novel metabolite clusters that associated with prevalent T2D.
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