Link: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26348471

J Proteome Res. 2015 Sep 8. [Epub ahead of print]
High resolution 1H NMR spectroscopy discriminates amniotic fluid of fetuses with congenital diaphragmatic hernia from healthy controls.
Croitor-Sava A, Beck V, Sandaite I, Van Huffel S, Dresselaers T, Claus F, Himmelreich U, Deprest J.
Abstract
Lung hypoplasia in congenital diaphragmatic hernia (CDH) is a life-threatening birth defect. Severe cases can be offered tracheal occlusion to boost prenatal lung development, though defining those to benefit remains challenging. Metabonomics of 1H NMR spectra collected from amniotic fluid (AF) can identify general changes in diseased versus healthy fetuses. AF contains lung secretions, hence, might reflect pulmonary characteristics among general markers of disease in CDH fetuses. AF from 81 healthy and 22 CDH fetuses was collected. NMR spectroscopy was performed at 400 MHz to compare AF from fetuses with CDH against controls. Several advanced feature extraction methods based on statistical tests which explore spectral variability, similarity and dissimilarity were applied and compared. This resulted in the identification of 30 spectral regions, which accounted for 80% variability between CDH and controls. Combination with automated classification discriminates AF from CDH versus healthy fetuses with 86% accuracy. Within the identified spectral regions isoleucine, leucine, valine, pyruvate, GABA, glutamate, glutamine, citrate, creatine, creatinine, taurine and glucose were the most concentrated metabolites. As the metabolite pattern of AF changes with fetal development, we have excluded metabolites with a high age-related variability and repeated the analysis with twelve spectral regions, which has resulted in similar classification accuracy. From this analysis, it was possible to distinguish between AF from fetuses with CDH from healthy controls independent of gestational age dependent metabolic changes.

PMID: 26348471 [PubMed - as supplied by publisher]