Urine metabolite analysis offers potential early diagnosis of ovarian and breast cancers.

PURPOSE

Metabolomics is a new, rapidly expanding field dedicated to the global study of metabolites in biological systems. In this article metabolomics is applied to find urinary biomarkers for breast and ovarian cancer.

EXPERIMENTAL DESIGN

Urine samples were collected from early- and late-stage breast and ovarian cancer patients during presurgical examinations and randomly from females with no known cancer. After quantitatively measuring a set of metabolites using nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy, both univariate and multivariate statistical analyses were employed to determine significant differences.

RESULTS

Metabolic phenotypes of breast and ovarian cancers in comparison with normal urine and with each other revealed significance at Bonferroni-corrected significance levels resulting in unique metabolite patterns for breast and ovarian cancer. Intermediates of the tricarboxylic acid cycle and metabolites relating to energy metabolism, amino acids, and gut microbial metabolism were perturbed.

CONCLUSIONS

The results presented here illustrate that urinary metabolomics may be useful for detecting early-stage breast and ovarian cancer.