Metabolic signatures and potential biomarkers of sarcopenia in suburb-dwelling older Chinese: based on untargeted GC–MS and LC–MS

Untargeted metabolomics can be used to expand our understanding of the pathogenesis of sarcopenia. However, the metabolic signatures of sarcopenia patients have not been thoroughly investigated. Herein, we explored metabolites associated with sarcopenia by untargeted gas chromatography (GC)/liquid chromatography (LC)–mass spectrometry (MS) and identified possible diagnostic markers. Forty-eight elderly subjects with sarcopenia were age and sex matched with 48 elderly subjects without sarcopenia. We first used untargeted GC/LC–MS to analyze the plasma of these participants and then combined it with a large number of multivariate statistical analyses to analyze the data. Finally, based on a multidimensional analysis of the metabolites, the most critical metabolites were considered to be biomarkers of sarcopenia. According to variable importance in the project (VIP > 1) and the p-value of t-test (p < 0.05), a total of 55 metabolites by GC–MS and 85 metabolites by LC–MS were identified between sarcopenia subjects and normal controls, and these were mostly lipids and lipid-like molecules. Among the top 20 metabolites, seven phosphatidylcholines, seven lysophosphatidylcholines (LysoPCs), phosphatidylinositol, sphingomyelin, palmitamide, L-2-amino-3-oxobutanoic acid, and palmitic acid were downregulated in the sarcopenia group; only ethylamine was upregulated. Among that, three metabolites of LysoPC(17:0), L-2-amino-3-oxobutanoic acid, and palmitic acid showed very good prediction capacity with AUCs of 0.887 (95% CI = 0.817–0.957), 0.836 (95% CI = 0.751–0.921), and 0.805 (95% CI = 0.717–0.893), respectively. These findings show that metabonomic analysis has great potential to be applied to sarcopenia. The identified metabolites could be potential biomarkers and could be used to study sarcopenia pathomechanisms.