Follicular Adenomas Exhibit a Unique Metabolic Profile. 1H NMR Studies of Thyroid Lesions

Abstract

Thyroid cancer is the most common endocrine malignancy. However, more than 90% of thyroid nodules are benign. It remains unclear whether thyroid carcinoma arises from preexisting benign nodules. Metabolomics can provide valuable and comprehensive information about low molecular weight compounds present in living systems and further our understanding of the biology regulating pathological processes. Herein, we applied 1H NMR-based metabolic profiling to identify the metabolites present in aqueous tissue extracts of healthy thyroid tissue (H), non-neoplastic nodules (NN), follicular adenomas (FA) and malignant thyroid cancer (TC) as an alternative way of investigating cancer lesions. Multivariate statistical methods provided clear discrimination not only between healthy thyroid tissue and pathological thyroid tissue but also between different types of thyroid lesions. Potential biomarkers common to all thyroid lesions were identified, namely, alanine, methionine, acetone, glutamate, glycine, lactate, tyrosine, phenylalanine and hypoxanthine. Metabolic changes in thyroid cancer were mainly related to osmotic regulators (taurine and scyllo- and myo-inositol), citrate, and amino acids supplying the TCA cycle. Thyroid follicular adenomas were found to display metabolic features of benign non-neoplastic nodules and simultaneously displayed a partial metabolic profile associated with malignancy. This finding allows the discrimination of follicular adenomas from benign non-neoplastic nodules and thyroid cancer with similar accuracy. Moreover, the presented data indicate that follicular adenoma could be an individual stage of thyroid cancer development.

Metabolic changes associated with papillary thyroid carcinoma: A nuclear magnetic resonance-based metabolomics study

“…a total of 16 patients (4 males, 12 females; age range, 19-59 years; tumor size, 1-4.2 cm) had undergone surgical thyroidectomy at the first affiliated Hospital of nanjing medical university. Previous metabolomic studies using cancer tissues have proved that similar sample number and characteristics of the population can provide useful information on metabolic changes of cancer (4,(9)(10)(11). matched normal thyroid tissues and tumor tissues were obtained from the same PTC patients.…”

“…additionally, the metabolite coverage is different between nmr and Gc-mS (8). therefore, different metabolomic information can be provided by nmr and Gc-mS. there are limited published metabolomic studies regarding Ptc using nmr (9)(10)(11), but these studies focused on the diagnosis of Ptc, and therefore the detailed metabolic changes especially metabolic pathway changes related to Ptc pathogenesis are still largely unknown. Given these facts, it is necessary to adopt nmr based metabolomics technology to study the detailed metabolic changes and disturbed metabolic pathways in Ptc.…”

Metabolomics provide new insights on lung cancer staging and discrimination from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease

“…Metabolomics potential can be used to evaluate cancer staging [41][42][43]. To differentiate the metabolomic fingerprints of early stage (I and II) patients from advanced stage (III and IV) lung cancer patients, the OPLS-DA model was built (Fig.…”

Papillary Thyroid Carcinoma: A Malignant Tumor with Increased Antioxidant Defense Capacity

“…Each tissue specimen was thawed in 500 μl of 0.5M sterile phosphate buffer (pH7.5) and homogenized with a mechanical homogenizer (M-HOG-020, Labec, Marrickville, NSW, Australia) in sterile tubes, immersed in ice cold distilled water during the homogenization process. The homogenates were centrifuged at 8,161 × g for 10 min, and the supernatants were aliquoted and stored at −80°C for further biochemical analyses (Deja et al 2013).…”