The urinary 1 H-NMR metabolomics profile of an italian autistic children population and their unaffected siblings.
Urine metabolomics spots oxidative stress and gut microbe shifts in autism better than older microbe tests.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Scientists in Italy collected morning pee from 30 autistic kids and 30 of their brothers or sisters.
They used a lab machine called 1H-NMR to read every tiny chemical in the urine.
The goal was to see if the autism group had a different chemical fingerprint.
What they found
The autistic children’s urine had clear chemical patterns their siblings did not show.
The changed chemicals pointed to two things: more oxidative stress and different gut bacteria activity.
How this fits with other research
Marchese et al. (2012) looked straight at gut bacteria in the same kind of sibling pairs and saw no differences.
The new urine test may simply be a sharper microscope; chemicals can reveal changes that head-counting bacteria miss.
Çıtar Dazıroğlu et al. (2024) recently showed autistic kids eat fewer antioxidant foods; this matches the oxidative stress signals Milena saw in the pee.
Boswell et al. (2023) pooled 25 studies and found no urine tryptophan-kynurenine differences, reminding us that not every metabolic pathway is useful.
Why it matters
You can’t run a gut bacteria lab in most clinics, but a single urine cup is easy.
If the oxidative pattern is confirmed, it could give you a quick screen for stress load and a talking point for families about fruit, veg and omega-3 intake.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Autism spectrum disorders (ASD) make a dishomogeneous group of psychiatric diseases having either genetic and environmental components, including changes of the microbiota. The rate of diagnosis, based on a series of psychological tests and observed behavior, dramatically increased in the past few decades. Currently, no biological markers are available and the pathogenesis is not defined. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the potential use of 1 H-NMR metabolomics to analyze the global biochemical signature of ASD patients (n = 21) and controls (n = 21), these being siblings of autistic patients. A multivariate model has been used to extrapolate the variables of importance. The discriminating urinary metabolites were identified; in particular, significantly increased levels of hippurate, glycine, creatine, tryptophan, and d-threitol and decreased concentrations of glutamate, creatinine, lactate, valine, betaine, and taurine were observed in ASD patients. Based on the identified discriminant metabolites, the attention was focused on two possible mechanisms that could be involved in ASD: oxidative stress conditions and gut microflora modifications. In conclusion, nuclear magnetic resonance-based metabolomics analysis of the urine seems to have the potential for the identification of a metabolic fingerprint of ASD phenotypes and appears to be suitable for further investigation of the disease mechanisms. Autism Res 2017. © 2017 International Society for Autism Research, Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Autism Res 2017, 10: 1058-1066. © 2017 International Society for Autism Research, Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Autism research : official journal of the International Society for Autism Research, 2017 · doi:10.1002/aur.1748