Analysis of urine metabolic profile in patients with hepatocellular carcinoma

Objective: To study the changes of urinary metabolic profile, screen metabolic ions characterization with clinical diagnostic value, and a disease differentiation model establishment, in an attempt to help the clinical diagnosis of hepatocellular carcinoma patients. Methods: A case-control study was conducted. Ultra-performance liquid chromatography/mass spectrometry (UPLC-MS) were used to analyze urine samples of 32 patients with hepatocellular carcinoma, 28 patients with liver cirrhosis and 28 healthy persons, respectively. The orthogonal partial least squares discriminant analysis (OPLS-DA) and the principal component analysis (PCA) model were constructed using MZmine2.0 and SIMCA-P + 12.0.1.0 software for preliminary screening of metabolites. The metabolic ions selected in the final test were analyzed by SPSS, and the markers were analyzed and screened by one-way analysis of variance. Finally, the sensitivity and specificity of the selected markers were analyzed by calculating the area under the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve. One-way analysis of variance was used to compare quantitative indicators between groups. Results: OPLS-DA model parameters were R2X = 35.3%, R2Y = 86.9%, and Q2 = 72.2%, which had a good identification value. A total of 26 characteristic ions were screened, of which 17 were identified. 14, 19-Dihydroaspidospermatine had a high value in distinguishing healthy person with hepatocellular carcinoma patients, and the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve was higher than 0.9. The area under the ROC curve for distinguishing liver cancer with liver cirrhosis patients was 0.88, which was higher than the ROC curve of alpha-fetoprotein (0.75). Conclusion: Based on the UPLC-MS platform, the PCA and OPLS-DA models were successfully constructed, and the characteristic metabolic ions in the urine were extracted and identified, which has a certain value in assisting clinical screening of hepatocellular carcinoma patients.