Metabolomics and lipidomics in non-small cell lung cancer

Due to its insidious nature, lung cancer remains a leading cause of cancer-related deaths worldwide. Therefore, there is an urgent need to identify sensitive/specific biomarkers for early diagnosis and monitoring. The current study was designed to provide a current metabolic profile of non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) by systematically reviewing and summarizing various metabolomic/ lipidomic studies based on NSCLC blood samples, attempting to find biomarkers in human blood that can predict or diagnose NSCLC, and investigating the involvement of key metabolites in the pathogenesis of NSCLC. We searched all articles on lung cancer published in Elsevier, PubMed, Web of Science and the Cochrane Library between January 2012 and December 2022. After critical selection, a total of 31 studies (including 2768 NSCLC patients and 9873 healthy individuals) met the inclusion criteria, and 22 were classified as "high quality". Forty-six metabolites related to NSCLC were repeatedly identified, involving glucose metabolism, amino acid metabolism, lipid metabolism and nucleotide metabolism. Pyruvic acid, carnitine, phenylalanine, isoleucine, kynurenine and 3-hydroxybutyrate showed upward trends in all studies, citric acid, glycine, threonine, cystine, alanine, histidine, inosine, betaine and arachidic acid showed downward trends in all studies. This review summarizes the existing metabolomic/lipidomic studies related to the identification of blood biomarkers in NSCLC, examines the role of key metabolites in the pathogenesis of NSCLC, and provides an important reference for the clinical diagnosis and treatment of NSCLC. Due to the limited size and design heterogeneity of the existing studies, there is an urgent need for standardization of future studies, while validating existing findings with more studies.