Metabolomics specificity of tuberculosis plasma revealed by ¹H NMR spectroscopy

Tuberculosis (TB) is a communicable disease of major global importance and causes metabolic disorder of the patients. In a previous study, we found that the plasma metabolite profile of TB patients differs from that of healthy control subjects based on nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy. In order to evaluate the TB specificity of the metabolite profile, a total of 110 patients, including 40 with diabetes, 40 with malignancy, and 30 with community-acquired pneumonia (CAP), assessed by NMR spectroscopy, and compared to those of patients with TB. Based on the orthogonal partial least-squares discriminant analysis (OPLS-DA), the metabolic profiles of these diseases were significant different, as compared to the healthy controls and TB patients, respectively. The score plots of the OPLS-DA model demonstrated that TB was easily distinguishable from diabetes, CAP and malignancy. Plasma levels of ketone bodies, lactate, and pyruvate were increased in TB patient compared to healthy control, but lower than CAP and malignancy. We conclude that the metabolic profiles were TB-specific and reflected MTB infection. Our results strongly support the NMR spectroscopy-based metabolomics could contribute to an improved understanding of disease mechanisms and may offer clues to new TB clinic diagnosis and therapies.