Background: Acute Spinal Cord Injury (ASCI) is still having substantial morbidity and mortality despite of advanced therapeutics. Major obstacles are paucity of monitoring tools or biomarkers for severity determination, recovery and prognostication. A prospective case control pilot study with serum 1H NMR spectroscopic metabolic profiling was carried out to evaluate metabolites perturbations and its relationship with recovery and to see role of stem cells in facilitating neurological recovery.
Methodology: Twenty subjects with ASCI were classified on the basis of therapeutic modality into surgical fixation alone (Group-1, n = 10), stem cell adjuvant (Group-2, n = 10) and healthy controls (Group-0, n = 10). Serum samples were collected at admission (baseline) and after six months (follow-up). NMR data of serum sample were quantified and subjected to Wilcoxon and ANOVA tests. Further validation was performed using supervised OSC-PCA and OPLS-DA by incorporating substantial control samples.
Result: Twenty-eight metabolites were identified; well resolved resonances of fifteen metabolites were quantified wherein seven were statistically significant. Predominantly amino acids and ketone bodies played vital role in the differentiation of groups.
Conclusions: Serum NMR spectroscopy reveals certain metabolites perturbations having clear correlation with pattern of recovery in treated ASCI subject. Stem cells treatment group had comparatively effective recovery.
Keywords: Biomarker; Metabolomic profiling; NMR spectroscopy; Spinal cord injury; Stem cell.
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