Metabolomics data complemented drug use information in epidemiological databases: pilot study of potential kidney donors.

OBJECTIVE

The objective of this study was to investigate whether clinical metabolomics, which is increasingly applied in population-based and epidemiological studies, can be used to provide analytical evidence of exposures, and whether such information can be useful to strengthen and/or complement corresponding clinical database entries, taking drug use as an example.

STUDY DESIGN AND SETTING

Liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry (LC-MS) metabolomics analyses were performed on urine from 100 randomly-selected control subjects (50% females) from the TransplantLines Food and Nutrition Biobank and Cohort Study (NCT identifier 'NCT02811835'), and drugs were identified through spectral library searching and targeted signal extraction.

RESULTS

In 83 subjects for whom drug use information was available, 22 expected and 26 unexpected prescription-only drugs were identified, while 28 expected prescription-only drugs remained undetected. In addition, 7 prescription-only drugs were found in 17 subjects for whom drug use information was unavailable, and 58 over-the-counter drugs were identified in all 100 subjects.

CONCLUSION

Molecular evidence for many drugs could be retrieved from LC-MS metabolomics data, which could be useful to complement and strengthen epidemiological databases given that considerable discrepancies were found between analytically-identified drugs and drugs listed in the available clinical database.