How biomarker patterns can be utilized to identify individuals with a high disease burden: a bioinformatics approach...

Prevalences of non-communicable diseases such as depression and a range of somatic diseases are continuously increasing requiring simple and inexpensive ways to identify high-risk individuals to target with predictive and preventive approaches. Using k-mean cluster analytics, in study 1, we identified biochemical clusters (based on C-reactive protein, interleukin-6, fibrinogen, cortisol, and creatinine) and examined their link to diseases. Analyses were conducted in a US American sample (from the Midlife in the US study, N = 1234) and validated in a Japanese sample (from the Midlife in Japan study, N = 378). In study 2, we investigated the link of the biochemical clusters from study 1 to childhood maltreatment (CM). The three identified biochemical clusters included one cluster (with high inflammatory signaling and low cortisol and creatinine concentrations) indicating the highest disease burden. This high-risk cluster also reported the highest CM exposure. The current study demonstrates how biomarkers can be utilized to identify individuals with a high disease burden and thus, may help to target these high-risk individuals with tailored prevention/intervention, towards personalized medicine. Furthermore, our findings raise the question whether the found biochemical clusters have predictive character, as a tool to identify high-risk individuals enabling targeted prevention. The finding that CM was mostly prevalent in the high-risk cluster provides first hints that the clusters could indeed have predictive character and highlight CM as a central disease susceptibility factor and possibly as a leverage point for disease prevention/intervention.

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s13167-021-00255-0.