Metabolic Profiling of Type 1 Diabetes Mellitus in Children and Adolescents: a Case-control Study

Type 1 diabetes mellitus (T1DM) is one of the most common pediatric diseases and its incidence is rising in many countries. Recently, it has been shown that metabolites other than glucose play an important role in insulin deficiency and the development of diabetes. The aim of this study was to look for discriminating variation in the concentrations of small-molecule metabolites in the plasma of T1DM children compared with non-diabetic matched controls using proton nuclear magnetic resonance (1H-NMR)-based metabolomics.

This cross-sectional study was set-up to examine the metabolic profile in fasting plasma samples from 7 T1DM children and 7 non-diabetic controls aged 8 to 18 years, and matched for gender, age and BMI. The obtained plasma 1H-NMR spectra were rationally divided into 110 integration regions, representing the metabolic phenotype. These integration regions reflect the relative metabolite concentrations and were used as statistical variables to construct (train) a classification model in discriminating between T1DM patients and controls.