Phospholipid and glycerolipid metabolism as potential diagnostic biomarkers for acute pancreatitis

Abstract

Abstract Background Acute pancreatitis (AP) is characterized as a systemic inflammatory condition posing challenges in diagnosis and prognosis assessment. Lipid metabolism abnormalities, especially triacylglycerol (TAG) levels, have been reported, indicating their potential as biomarkers in acute pancreatitis. However, the performance of the TAG cycle, including phospholipid and glycerolipid metabolism, in AP patients has not yet been reported. Methods This study enrolled 91 patients with acute biliary pancreatitis (ABP), 27 with hyperlipidaemic acute pancreatitis (HLAP), and 58 healthy controls (HCs), and their plasma phospholipid and glycerolipid levels were analyzed through liquid chromatography‒mass spectrometry. The phospholipid and glycerolipid contents of plasma collected from AP patients on the first, third, and seventh days of hospitalization were also measured. An orthogonal partial least squares discriminant analysis model served to differentiate the ABP, HLAP and HC groups, and potentially diagnostic lipids were evaluated via receiver operating characteristic curves in both the test and validation sets. Correlations between clinical data and lipids were conducted using Spearman’s method. Clustering via the ‘mfuzz’ R package and the Kruskal‒Wallis H test were conducted to monitor changes during hospitalization. Results Compared with those in HCs, the levels of phosphatidylcholine (PC), phosphatidylethanolamine (PE), and phosphatidic acid (PA) were lower in AP patients, whereas the levels of phosphatidylinositol (PI) and phosphatidylglycerol (PG) showed the opposite trend. Interestingly, TAG levels were positively correlated with white blood cell counts in ABP patients, and TAGs containing 44–55 carbon atoms were highly correlated with plasma TAG levels in HLAP patients. Phospholipid levels exhibited an inverse correlation with AP markers, in contrast to glycerolipids, which demonstrated a positive correlation with these markers. Additionally, PE (O-16:0/20:4) and PE (18:0/22:6) emerged as potential biomarkers because of their ability to distinguish ABP and HLAP patients from HCs, showing area under the curve (AUC) values of 0.932 and 0.962, respectively. PG (16:0/18:2), PG (16:0/20:4), PE (P-16:0/20:2), PE (P-18:2/18:2), PE (P-18:1/20:3), PE (P-18:1/20:4), PE (O-16:0/20:4), and TAG (56:6/FA18:0) were significantly changed in ABP patients who improved. For HLAP patients, PC (18:0/20:3), TAG (48:3/FA18:1), PE (P-18:0/16:0), and TAG (48:4/FA18:2) showed different trends in patients with improvement and deterioration, which might be used for prognosis. Conclusions Phospholipids and glycerolipids were found to be potential biomarkers in acute pancreatitis, which offers new diagnostic and therapeutic insights into this disease.