Comparing metabolite profiles of habitual diet in serum and urine123

• Published in: The American journal of clinical nutrition 2016-09, Vol.104 (3), p.776-789
• Main Authors: Playdon, Mary C, Sampson, Joshua N, Cross, Amanda J, Sinha, Rashmi, Guertin, Kristin A, Moy, Kristin A, Rothman, Nathaniel, Irwin, Melinda L, Mayne, Susan T, Stolzenberg-Solomon, Rachael, Moore, Steven C
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: biomarker; diet; food; metabolite; metabolomics; nutrition assessment; Nutritional Epidemiology and Public Health; serum; urine
• ISSN: 0002-9165; 1938-3207
• DOI: 10.3945/ajcn.116.135301

Background: Diet plays an important role in chronic disease etiology, but some diet-disease associations remain inconclusive because of methodologic limitations in dietary assessment. Metabolomics is a novel method for identifying objective dietary biomarkers, although it is unclear what dietary information is captured from metabolites found in serum compared with urine. Objective: We compared metabolite profiles of habitual diet measured from serum with those measured from urine. Design: We first estimated correlations between consumption of 56 foods, beverages, and supplements assessed by a food-frequency questionnaire, with 676 serum and 848 urine metabolites identified by untargeted liquid chromatography mass spectrometry, ultra-high performance liquid chromatography tandem mass spectrometry, and gas chromatography mass spectrometry in a colon adenoma case–control study (n = 125 cases and 128 controls) while adjusting for age, sex, smoking, fasting, case-control status, body mass index, physical activity, education, and caloric intake. We controlled for multiple comparisons with the use of a false discovery rate of