Research Article
Targeted Metabolomics for Plasma Amino Acids and Carnitines in Patients with Metabolic Syndrome Using HPLC-MS/MS
Figure 4
The study flow chart. A targeted metabolomic analysis in human plasma samples to identify differences of amino acid and carnitine in metabolic features between HC and MetS patients in the training set (40 MetSs and 40 HCs). A total of 14 metabolites with VIP threshold (), value () with a false discovery rate , and or <0.67 were selected as metabolite markers. Then, there is another validation analysis to further evaluate changes in the levels of potential biomarkers between MetS patients and HC (80 MetSs and 80 HCs). Two of carnitines revealed satisfactory diagnostic values with area under ROC curve more than 0.7. The levels of hydroxydecanoyl carnitine and methylglutarylcarnitine were significantly decreased in MetS patients when compared with the HC group.