Uric acid (UA) is the only biomedical indicator for gout in clinic that always leads to an uncertain diagnose. Due to the lack of reliable metabolites, it is now already highly desirable to diagnose gout definitely.
Metabonomics was employed to screen and identify novel biomarkers of gout based on human serum and urine. High performance liquid chromatography-diode array detector (HPLC-DAD) and orthogonal signal correction partial least squares discriminate analysis (OSC-PLS-DA) were also used for metabonomics study.
Several potential biomarkers including uric acid, creatinine, tryptophan in serum and uric acid, creatinine, guanosine, hippuric acid in urine, were respectively screened and identified. For serum and urine, the predictive levels about the OSC-PLS-DA models of the gout and controls were 95.76% and 100%, and the correction levels about the seriousness of the disease were 90.32% and 87.5%, respectively.
Compared with intermittent gout, the acute gout shows clearly the dysfunctions of purine, protein and glucose metabolism. The metabolizing of guanosine to UA increases the levels of UA in serum at the acute stage. Our research contributes to a better understanding of the metabolic mechanism and allowing the targeted therapy of gout at different stages.