Lipid Biomarkers in Acute Myocardial Infarction Before and After Percutaneous Coronary Intervention by Lipidomics Analysis

BACKGROUND: Reperfusion injury is one of the leading causes of myocardial cell death and heart failure. This study was performed to identify new candidate lipid biomarkers for the purpose of optimizing the diagnosis of myocardial ischemia reperfusion (I/R) injury, assessing the severity of myocardial I/R injury and trying to find the novel mechanism related to lipids. MATERIAL/METHODS: Forty patients who were diagnosed with ST-segment elevation myocardial infarction (STEMI) were randomly selected for this study. Serum samples from all the patients with STEMI were collected at 3 time periods: after STEMI diagnosis but prior to reperfusion (T(0)); and then at 2 hours (T(2)) and 24 hours (T(24)) after the end of the percutaneous coronary intervention procedure. Plasma lipidomics profiling analysis was performed to identify the lipid metabolic signatures of myocardial I/R injury using lipidomics. RESULTS: Sixteen types of potential lipid biomarkers at different time periods (T(0), T(2), T(24)) were identified by using lipidomics technology. The T(0) time periods exhibited 16 differentially metabolized lipid peaks in the patients after STEMI diagnosis but prior to reperfusion. With the increase of reperfusion times, the contents of these 16 lipid biomarkers decreased gradually, but there was a 1.5- to 2-fold increase of those 16 lipid biomarkers contents at T(2) compared with T(24). CONCLUSIONS: Lipidomics analysis demonstrated differential change before and after reperfusion, suggesting a potential role of some of these lipids as biomarkers for optimizing the diagnosis of myocardial I/R, as well as for therapeutic targets against myocardial I/R injury.