Abstract
Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a serious neurodevelopmental disorder with no clinical biomarker. This study used untargeted metabolomic analysis to identify metabolic characteristics in plasma that can distinguish ASD children. 29 boys with ASD (3.02 ± 0.67 years) and 30 typically developing (TD) boys (3.13 ± 0.46 years) were recruited. Developmental and behavioral assessments were conducted in ASD group. Samples of plasma were analyzed using liquid chromatography–tandem mass spectrometry (LC–MS/MS). The association between metabolite concentration and scale score was assessed by Spearman rank correlation. Altered metabolic characteristics were found in boys with ASD. In Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) analysis, ornithine had the highest AUC (Area under ROC) value. Furthermore, the concentration of choline and ornithine was negatively correlated with ABC-language score in ASD group.
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Acknowledgments
The authors wish to thank Lihong Zhu, vice president of The Affiliated Wuxi Children's Hospital of Nanjing Medical University, for her assistance in all aspects of the research. In addition, we would like to thank Dr. Yanshan Liu for his technical support in the detection of metabolites.
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This work was supported by Wuxi Science and Technology Development Project (CN) (Grant No. N20192005) and Open Fund Project of Jiangsu Population Society (CN) (Grant No. JSPA2019014).
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Lili Zhang conceived and designed the research; Ping Guan and Ziyun Zhou were in charge of the recruitment of participants; Ruixuan Zheng and Yanling Wu completed behavioral and developmental assessments in ASD group; Ying Xu conducted the preliminary treatment of blood samples; Jian Zhou was responsible for the detection of metabolites; Zaohuo Cheng rendered guidance in statistics analysis; all authors were involved in the data analysis and the interpretation of the results; Lei Wang contributed to the initial draft of the manuscript. All authors have read and approved the final manuscript.
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Wang, L., Zheng, R., Xu, Y. et al. Altered Metabolic Characteristics in Plasma of Young Boys with Autism Spectrum Disorder. J Autism Dev Disord 52, 4897–4907 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-021-05364-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-021-05364-3