The Hindu Business Line : Analysis of body's metabolism can tell whether you're healthy

LONDON: Want to find out whether you are healthy or diseased? An analysis of body's metabolism can give you an answer, says a new study. A team in Germany has shown that biological indicators for diseases caused or influenced by environmental factors ca n be detected by the systemic analysis of the body's metabolism that is metabolomics.

According to the scientists, the procedure is suitable for pre-clinical drug testing and allows for the detection of possible side effects of a new kind of medication early.

In their study, they analysed data collected in the framework of a pre-clinical metabolomics research in healthy and diabetic mice. In each case, a subgroup of the animals was treated with a diabetes drug. Then, more than 800 metabolites were quantitativ ely determined in a blood plasma sample of a total of 40 rodents, representing the factors “healthy/ diabetic” and “treated/ untreated”, the 'Endocrinology' journal reported.

“It transpired that in many cases the ratios between the concentrations of certain metabolites were much more informative than their absolute concentrations,” said the team leader Karsten Suhre of the Helmholtz Zentrum Mnchen said.

By a subsequent clustering of the test statistics of such metabolite pairs, it is possible to identify groups of metabolites which discriminate the animals by the factors “healthy/diabetic” or “treated/untreated”.

The present results show that diabetes-biomarkers can be identified by means of an objective bioinformatics analysis of complex metabolomics data obtained in high-throughput experiments, according to the researchers. - PTI

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