The cardiovascular risk of healthy individuals studied by NMR metabonomics of plasma samples

The identification and the present wide acceptance of cardiovascular risk factors such as age, sex, hypertension, hyperlipidemia, smoking, obesity, diabetes, and physical inactivity have led to dramatic reductions in cardiovascular morbidity and mortality. However, novel risk predictors present opportunities to identify more patients at risk and to more accurately define the biochemical signature of that risk. In this paper, we present a comprehensive metabonomic analysis of 864 plasma samples from healthy volunteers, through Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) and multivariate statistical analysis (regression and classification). We have found that subjects that are classified as at high or at low risk using the common clinical markers can also be discriminated using NMR metabonomics. This discrimination is not only due to common markers (such as total cholesterol, triglycerides, LDL, HDL), but also to (p < 0.05 after Bonferroni correction) other metabolites (e.g., 3-hydroxybutyrate, α-ketoglutarate, threonine, dimethylglycine) previously not associated with cardiovascular diseases.