Background: Decompression sickness (DCS) induced by fast buoyancy ascent escape (FBAE) is a special DCS, characterized with cardiopulmonary injuries. Serum metabonomics of this type of DCS has not yet been studied. We proposed a metabonomics approach for assessing serum metabonomics changes and evaluating the preventive effect of pyrrolidine dithiocarbamic acid (PDTC) in FBAE-induced DCS rats.
Methods: Sixty-five (65) rats were divided into three groups, including the Control, DCS and PDTC groups. After receiving physiological saline or PDTC pretreatment, rats in the DCS and PDTC groups received the same protocol of simulated FBAE. Following this, a metabonomics approach - combined with pattern recognition methods including PCA and PLS-DA - was used to characterize the global serum metabolic profile on survival rats (five rats per group) associated with abnormal FBAE-induced DCS. As the VIP-value threshold cutoff of the metabolites was set to 2, metabolites above this threshold were filtered out as potential target biomarkers.
Results: Sixteen (16) distinct potential biomarkers in rat plasma were identified. PDTC significantly lowered DSC mortality from 60% to 10%, and alleviated ultrastructural alteration of the left ventricular apex compared to the DCS group. It was found that abnormal FBAE-induced DCS was closely related to disturbed fatty acid metabolism, glycerophospholipid metabolism, sterol lipid metabolism, and bile acid metabolism. With the presented metabonomic method, we systematically analyzed the protective effects of PDTC.
Conclusion: The results demonstrated that PDTC administration could provide satisfactory effects on abnormal FBAE-induced DCS through partially regulating the perturbed metabolic pathways.
Keywords: FBAE; decompression sickness; metabonomics biomarker; ultra high-performance liquid chromatographymass spectrometry.