Metabolomic characterization of the early progression of cardiometabolic disease in a high fat and sucrose diet rat model

Metabolomics, which is the latest state-of-the-art omics platform, provides identification and quantitation of all metabolites in a sample, known as the cellular end products of metabolic reactions. These reactions could be a key factor in the development of surrounding complications involved in cardiometabolic disease (CMD). This disease includes a cluster of cardiometabolic risk factors such as obesity, hypertension, fatty liver disease, type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease. Therefore, the study of the metabolism involved at the first stages of development of CMD and identification of potential early biomarkers could be essential in patient management.The objective is to identify early potential CMD biomarkers with a metabolomic approach based on nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) in non-invasive biological samples.Male and female Wistar rats, 16 weeks old, were fed with a high-fat and sucrose diet (HFD) for 12 weeks to induce CMD. Blood serum, urine and fecal samples from high-fat fed rats were analyzed by NMR-Metabolomics.HFD induced some evidence of the development of CMD in the clinical data. The alterations included an increase in body weight and arterial blood pressure, changes in glycemic and triglycerides levels and lower HDL levels in the HFD group in comparison with control rats. Moreover, liver histology revealed lipid content, suggesting early hepatic damage. In addition, the metabolomic profile showed metabolism differences in the HFD group that affected metabolites involved in different metabolic pathways including host-microbiota co-metabolites. This analysis seems to indicate a correlation between some microbial metabolites with cardiometabolic parameters.Gut-Microbiota co-metabolism seems to be involved in the first stages of development of CMD on the host organism and the metabolomics can provide early potential biomarkers in a non-invasive way for sub-clinical CMD detection by NMR.