Plasma metabolomic biomarkers accurately classify acute mild traumatic brain injury from controls

Past and recent attempts at devising objective biomarkers for traumatic brain injury (TBI) in both blood and cerebrospinal fluid have focused on abundance measures of time-dependent proteins. Similar independent determinants would be most welcome in diagnosing the most common form of TBI, mild TBI (mTBI), which remains difficult to define and confirm based solely on clinical criteria. There are currently no consensus diagnostic measures that objectively define individuals as having sustained an acute mTBI. Plasma metabolomic analyses have recently evolved to offer an alternative to proteomic analyses, offering an orthogonal diagnostic measure to what is currently available. The purpose of this study was to determine whether a developed set of metabolomic biomarkers is able to objectively classify college athletes sustaining mTBI from non-injured teammates, within 6 hours of trauma and whether such a biomarker panel could be effectively applied to an independent cohort of TBI and contr...