NMR analysis reveals significant differences in the plasma metabolic profiles of Niemann Pick C1 patients, heterozygous carriers, and healthy controls

Niemann-Pick type C1 (NPC1) disease is a rare autosomal recessive, neurodegenerative lysosomal storage disorder, which presents with a range of clinical phenotypes and hence diagnosis remains a challenge. In view of these difficulties, the search for a novel, NPC1-specific biomarker (or set of biomarkers) is a topic of much interest. Here we employed high-resolution (1)H nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy coupled with advanced multivariate analysis techniques in order to explore and seek differences between blood plasma samples acquired from NPC1 (untreated and miglustat treated), heterozygote, and healthy control subjects. Using this approach, we were able to identify NPC1 disease with 91% accuracy confirming that there are significant differences in the NMR plasma metabolic profiles of NPC1 patients when compared to healthy controls. The discrimination between NPC1 (both miglustat treated and untreated) and healthy controls was dominated by lipoprotein triacylglycerol (1)H NMR resonances and isoleucine. Heterozygote plasma samples displayed also increases in the intensities of selected lipoprotein triacylglycerol (1)H NMR signals over those of healthy controls. The metabolites identified could represent useful biomarkers in the future and provide valuable insight in to the underlying pathology of NPC1 disease.