Comparative urinary metabolomics reveals unique and shared pathways in COVID-19 and liver diseases

The COVID-19 pandemic and liver diseases both cause significant metabolic disturbances, yet the specific mechanisms driving these changes remain poorly understood.

This study aimed to elucidate and compare the urinary metabolomic profiles of COVID-19 patients, individuals with liver diseases, and healthy controls to determine common and unique metabolic signatures between diseases.

Untargeted metabolomic profiling was performed using liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry (LC-MS) on urine samples from COVID-19 patients (n = 102), liver disease patients (n = 100), and healthy controls (n = 101). Differential metabolite abundance, pathway enrichment, network topology, and Random Forest-based machine learning analyses were performed.

Both COVID-19 and liver disease exhibited extensive metabolic reprogramming. COVID-19 patients showed suppression of Vitamin B6 and purine metabolism, indicating impaired energy production and antioxidant defense. Liver disease patients exhibited reduced primary bile acid biosynthesis and pantothenate metabolism, reflecting hepatic dysfunction. Random Forest models robustly discriminated disease from healthy states, with binary models for COVID-19 and liver disease achieving AUCs of 0.998, and a multiclass model distinguishing all three groups with 91.9% accuracy. Both conditions shared perturbations in amino acid and steroid-related pathways, reflecting common systemic stress. Importantly, unique metabolites, such as N-Acetylvaline, Succinyladenosine, and S-adenosylhomocysteine in COVID-19, and 3-Hydroxysebacic acid, Asn-Trp, and bile acid derivatives in liver disease, emerged as highly specific biomarkers, highlighting systemic viral stress versus chronic hepatic metabolic adaptation and warranting future validation.

These findings enhance our understanding of disease-specific metabolic remodelling and point to potential biomarkers for diagnosis and therapeutic targeting.